I’ve loved cyberpunk since I was old enough to dig through a second-hand bookstore on my own. But I’m tired, and I know I’m not alone. It’s hard to keep waving a flag for a genre that’s so often boiled down to a Hot Topic look and recycled stories. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the shambling disappointment of Cyberpunk 2077, which CDPR is still determined to keep working on . What many people recognize as cyberpunk today is mostly cosmetic , and reusing that aesthetic again and again is becoming tedious and meaningless. “What bothers me about cyberpunk is that it often gets carried away fetishizing the high-tech world it is ostensibly critiquing,” says indie designer Phoebe Shalloway. “It makes tech look sleek, sexy, and cool.” Shalloway has a different interest: she makes explicitly solar punk games, which offer a fresh new way to imagine the future. Solarpunk still includes working with technology, but with a positive focus on sustainability, community, and radical change to the world as it is today. Cyberpunk is often married to dystopia because of how it began—in the west it spawned from the Cold War, Reaganomics, and the perceived threat of an…