It shouldn’t have been called Single Player Mode

Cyberpunk Red has been going strong for around five years now. The game came out around the same time as the tie-in video game Cyberpunk 2077, and represented a return to form after 2005’s Cyberpunk v3 (and 2020 being over 30 years old). Now, R. Talsorian Games has kept the party going with continual Cyberpunk support both free (in the form of Monthly DLC) and for pay (in the form of the Interface Red collections as well as standalone supplements like Black Chrome). Single-Player Mode is the most recent standalone supplement, and your take on it will depend entirely on what you think a solo RPG is (or should be).

If you’re older than a certain age, when you think solo RPG you think something like Mythic GM Emulator, a set of rules that can act as a GM and let you play through modules or combats on your own. If you’re younger than a certain age (let’s say younger than me at least), your first thought of a solo RPG is probably more like a journaling game, or a hybrid narrative game like The Wretched. It’s important to state this because despite its 2025 release date Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is firmly the first of those two. There are no campaign framing tools, no narrative generation, and no character supplements. Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is built firmly on using an ‘oracle’ to answer questions which allow you to progress forward through your imagined narrative, and also provides tools to let you play out investigations, social interactions, combats, and neutrons all on your lonesome. What it’s truly best at, though, is having a library of random tables which enable you to set up all sorts of premises, missions, and random encounters to make your Cyberpunk solo game more interesting. You may realize as I say this that random tables aren’t just for solo gaming. Not only is that true, it means that while I think Single Player Mode makes for an excellent GM aid and has some good rules additions…it just doesn’t work as an effective solo game.

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The Last Caravan – Con-Apocalyptic Road Trip

They came less than a year ago. The war was swift – and brutal.

Humans and aliens bombed each other to smithereens, and now both sides are licking their wounds. Mysterious new factions rise to join the struggle of the fallen titans. In this landscape of shifting allegiances, we may have to choose sides. Debris from the explosion of the aliens’ mothership has clouded the atmosphere, lowering the temperature and creating the coldest winter in a thousand years.
We find ourselves in a melancholy, wintry landscape — quiet, until it’s not. Egg-shaped alien structures thirty stories tall now squat, humming, over the cities they crushed. Xenofauna and lost invaders stalk the woods and highways. A war is brewing in the aching silence.

We are navigating the waking remnants of human and alien empires — and all we’ve got is a car, our fellow travelers, and the road.

It’s time to head west with The Last Caravan.

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