Hard Wired Island is a game about being Gay Communist Cyberpunks... in SPAAACE!!! The system has some nice features, with specialized rules for social situations, stealth, hacking, and combat based around "mood" environmental tags, and the quirk that you can't do the same combat action twice in a row. The burden/economic shock system is a great representation of being broke without having to run a budget (hard pass).

But the star of the show is Grand Cross, a city set in a massive O'Neill habitat at Earth-Luna L5. Grand Cross is the new frontier, but it's controlled by exploitative and stupid corporations, full of criminal gangs and prejudiced goons, and facing a consequential election. Rogue artificial intelligences lurk in the station's basements, and the cops are worse than useless.

The art is great, and there are dozens of locations, districts, and NPCs, all dripping with adventure hooks. I have a couple of quibbles: the setting leans into "fans are slans" otaku references, which may not the be to everyone's taste. And for a game which is so upfront about the need to build a political coalition to replace Cartel, and that doing this will require Cool Space Crime, there's not a lot of rules for doing so.

And I'm a little harder on Goodreads than I am on Itch. While there's a lot of content, it's not actually diverse content. There's a parade of cool and helpful bar owners with geek T-shirts, and a carousel of greedy executives and brutal cops, but it's hard to say why you should use one NPC or place over another, a negative strike compared to Blades in the Dark where the NPC gangs all have unique agendas and districts have unique vibes.

The politics is similarly floppy. The basic problem of Grand Cross is that it's a frontier that's outgrowing its first steps. Housing was initially free for the people who built the station, and could be bought Earthside with enough money or a lucky lottery ticket, but space is running short and privatized rent is crushing ordinary people. It's just the homesteader problem with a cyberpunk gloss. And while the game is very clear that capitalism and cops are the problem, it gestures at hoary ideas of being Punk and Authentic and having Solidarity rather than the criminal chaos that a handful of independent psyops can topple a political system, the awful Constitutional moment when violence breaks into the chambers of the legislature, or the transhuman technopolitics of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. Unfortunately, this is still form over content.

Still, this is a massive book with a lot to offer for people looking to run a cyberpunk game. I might mod in rules from BitD or W.M. Aker's Comrades, but I'm happy to have this on my shelf.