Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is an amazing and less sanitized version of SEGA's Jet Set Radio. Developed by Team Reptile, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk puts you on a quest to discover the past of the main character while competing with rival gangs and fighting militarized police to conquer the city of New Amsterdam with skating, graffiti, and vandalism.
I've just finished the main story of BRC, but I can't drop the game just yet. I'm hooked by how it's persuading me to explore every area, even after I've chosen to ignore its collectibles in the post-game.
I could spend hours talking about how BRC, an indie game that's not restrained by SEGA's moral compass like Jet Set Radio was, is a lot of fun. But the game was the first one in a while that made me want to explore the stages more than any other open-world game I've ever played.
Exploration in open-world games or in games with large areas is usually restricted in some way. Take Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. When the player looks at the horizon, they see towers and spots they might want to explore. Not only are they far away, though, the player can't go there too early because they're indirectly locked by progression. The mountain might be too cold and require the player to have cold-resistant gear or food, or maybe they need a specific unlockable item to reach that area. These games show the player where they can go but say "Hey, take note of this, because you'll need to come back here later."
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk doesn't block your path. It shows you a wall you can tag in the tallest building in the area and makes it look impossible to reach. But no mechanic in this game locks progression. As long as you can control your character properly and explore the area in detail, you can reach any point with a shiny taggable wall on it.
I understood early that I could reach every shiny wall, so I felt like the game was challenging me. I could hear BRC saying, "I doubt you can reach this wall" whenever I entered a new area and saw that yellow marking at the top of the tallest building.
The apparently unreachable walls are a promise of reward you will get from skill and further exploration. Since no mechanics or items block you from reaching these hidden or nearly inaccessible places, all you have to do is explore the surrounding area to find the starting point to the path to the area. Usually, they involve a bunch of jumping and sliding puzzles, like billboard hopping, sliding on cables between buildings, or secret passages to slide underneath. It adds a skill factor to exploration that almost feels like solving a puzzle.
These difficult-to-reach BRC areas are nothing special, though. At most, they have an extra-large wall that will give you a little more REP when you tag it, though similar walls exist in more accessible locations.
Reaching these tough spots was enough of a reward for me, and I made it a personal goal to do so in all areas. BRC made me enjoy exploration enough to create objectives for myself, even though the game has its own side goals with countless collectibles. And if a game makes me comfortable enough to create my own challenges and they still make sense in the game, that's when I know I'm playing a masterpiece.
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