If you don’t know anything about the world of Shadowrun, it’s a prime example of the cyberpunk genre we all know and love, full of heartless megacorporations, hackers with glowing avatars, the word “runner” indicating someone working a spurious career path, and thousands upon thousands of square kilometers of crotch-scented slums. However, it’s got one major twist that transmogrifies it into something distinct from all its would-be twins: thanks to a mysterious “awakening” about fifty years before the setting’s present day, this particular universe houses elves and dwarves, orcs and ogres, demons and magic. These exist alongside the humdrum day-to-day of glaring neon and hand-to-mouth desperation. And here, recent Kickstarter success Shadowrun Returns is all about your deeply flawed character’s noir-flavored quest to solve the murder of an old friend — though in a world where everyone lives in the shadow of unreachable highrises, even your motives are shady.

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