Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

HyperMall Unlimited Violence is a 248 page game by JD Clement, with art by Bryton J Swan and additional art by a bunch of other artists. It’s a cyberpunk game, that appears loosely inspired by Troika! In it, you and your fellow contractors go on missions against the corporations that run the world.

This is maximalist layout. Every page is heavily collaged, it’s rare to have text running vertically down the page. It’s messy. It’s a vibe. It’s most reminiscent in its maximialism of Mork Borg, but I personally find it a little harder to read than Mork Borg, largely because it’s intentionally less cohesive. These choices often are reflected in a less easy to navigate book — in a short book like Mork Borg, it works well, but in an almost 250 page book, where you need to find your way around, a little more consistency in terms of page numbering colours, or section headers, etc. would really go a long way.

So, what does this massive book contain? Well, the rules take up the first 5 or so pages, and then we have 75 pages of backgrounds. We then have some player-facing rules — skills, psionics, mutations, resurrection and gear — for about 50 pages. Then, we have a short 15 pages on how to run the game, and finally, a few pages on the world of the Hypermall, and then a mission generator and a section on enemies, along with a list of 36 enemies. That’s a lot, and the nature of Critique Navidad means I don’t have a lot of capacity to dig into this in a lot of detail; what I’ll do, is cherry pick some examples.

The rules are more or less Troika!, with a few small changes (a dice pool, mixed successes, a few types of combat, no chip-based initiative). It incorporates a bunch of tech from the Apocalypse World through Blades in the Dark lineage into a Troika! framework, effectively. It’s a neat jam, but it explicitly says the system doesn’t matter: on, and the game agrees with me: “This is all the boring s**t nobody cares about. Let’s get to the part about the killing.”. This is a vibes game, through and through. If you like Troika! Backgrounds, you’re going to like these backgrounds, as they’re similarly flavourful and communicate a lot about the world of the Hypermall. There’s normal cyberpunk here, and also weirder stuff like the carcinized believer, a human who’s religion has transformed them into a crustacean hybrid of some kind. What’s interesting to me about the world of Hypermall is that it’s not always clear what level of reality these backgrounds are actually existing in. In combination with the intro, and especially the end of book setting information, you get an impressionistic idea of what this world is like, if you read enough of the book, or else you’re going to make it up in concert with your players. The referee advice section adds referee moves into the framework — really a necessity if you’re going to add partial success. “Let’s get to the part about the killing.” is the pinch point here. We get advice around making the violence fun in the referee section, but it weirdly doesn’t do enough to show us how to make the violence fun. This is a game that expects you to be steeped in violence as a genre, rather than something that supports you in being hyper violent. Compared to say Vengeance California or Crank It Up, two other hyper violent games, it doesn’t really tell you how to be violent. It relies on the referee for that support.

But, this world is not my jam at all. The writing is very cyberpunk and gross in a bunch of ways. It’s darkly funny. But, the hostility of the writing and the hostility in the world, in combination with the — aesthetically appropriate — challenging and bold layout — is that I really struggle to read it, and I’d struggle even more to run it or play in it. For me, I exist in a cyberpunk hellscape already, and this parodic one is a little too close to real life for me to want to spend time here. If you’re not sure whether this is for you, the title of the holiday module that’s been released is likely to tell you whether you’ll enjoy the writing and the world.

HyperMall Unlimited Violence is an interesting beast, though. The big caveat is that you might bounce off the layout and art style, but you can see examples of that right there on the store page: Trust me when I tell you it is all like that. If you have played Troika! but you thought it needed some storygame influence to fulfil it’s promises, this is probably a mechanical direction you’ll appreciate, and is worth looking at for that purpose. If you’re looking to play in a parodically dark cyberpunk future, and the mainstream ones are a little too clean for you, then this one might appeal to you. There are a lot of people who are going to absolutely eat up this hyper-stylised, maximalist, Troika/Storygame hybrid, extreme parody of our impending cyberpunk future. Sadly, HyperMall Unlimited Violence is not for me.

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