Cyberpunk might just be the most easily misused genre in history. Those clichéd neon-lit, smog-choked, rainy cities are evocative enough to attract creators less interested in the moral messages of the subject matter like minnows to an anglerfish. Everybody wants their speculative fiction to look like Blade Runner or evoke the ‘80s cool of Neuromancer. But very few address the power dynamics that turned those rainy megalopolises into sad, smog-choked dystopias.

The Red Strings Club is endlessly interested in who does and doesn’t wield society’s power—and what they should do about that. It flits from a corporate high rise literally towering over a fragile populace to the titular Red Strings Club bar, where social lubricants and social engineering pull the metaphorical strings of tech executives. We see people subtly manipulated and outright killed for knowing too much. And it’s all in service of asking, as well as answering, what makes a successful society.

The narrative adventure/bartending simulator isn’t always subtle in pursuing those themes—not that it can always afford to be, given its tight run time of three hours or so. Subtle or not, though, the game blessedly has more to say about its source material than “neon makes great backlighting.”

Things kick off in medias res, with one of your main playable characters bloody and plummeting to his death outside a skyscraper. But the real action begins at the club itself, where a busted android stumbles off the street and into the lives of our two heroes, Brandeis and Donovan. The computer hacking and bartending power-couple uses the bot to learn about a corporate conspiracy of infectious mind control. Utterly lacking the power to stop such a massive existential threat, they set out to do just that.