It’s a connection that is reinforced by Rain World’s level designer James Therrien, who always thought the glyphs in the game resembled the symbols of Hangul, the Korean alphabet. He experienced the city as a foreigner, surrounded by unusual customs and intricate symbols, all of which he struggled to understand. Speaking with Swedish programmer Joar Jakobsson, he explains that he started working on Rain World in 2011 when he lived as an exchange student in Seoul. Their omnipresence throughout the game suggests they are just another use of Asian symbolism as shorthand for a dystopic future, and yet they emerge not from tired cliche, but lived experience. Those symbols hang in broken lights across rusted silos and act as unknown instructions at the mechanical gateways that control access to Rain World’s different regions.

Temples built from old stone crouch beneath towering icons of steel and glass But the underlying story is told in the game’s backgrounds, which act as a thick brochure for a collapsed civilization, one built from vast megastructures, and that communicated with Asian-style symbols. It’s a game that forces you to focus on its foregrounds, where you control a slugcat as it wrestles with an aggressive ecosystem, and flees from rain that falls hard enough to kill. It’d be easy to draw a line from this tradition of fear and awe to Rain World. Cyberpunk imagines a dystopia caused by the rise of Japanese culture across the globe you can hear it in the pidgin slang on the streets, see it in the foreign glyphs flashing on overhead signage. And in Neuromancer, the Triads and Yakuza are conglomerated as the “Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum”-a reference to the Chrysanthemum Throne of the Japanese emperor, acknowledging their influence over the population. Think of the classic shot from Blade Runner: Los Angeles overlooked by a geisha from an advert on the side of a corporate skyscraper. Cyberpunk is a warning concerned in part with the rise of the East. The response to this was a new type of techno-orientalism, which we celebrate for its spectacle, but often forget is a visual shorthand for an urban nightmare, filled with zaibatsu overlords, transhuman uncertainty, and cramped living spaces. Japan seemed poised to take over the world and put an end to the American Century. Japan’s economic boom in the ‘80s and subsequent rise in cultural exports, including cars, mecha anime, and personal electronics, struck fear into the West. While this practice might seem like a love letter, in reality, for Western literature and cinema to imagine an Asian future, was to give credence to a particular form of American paranoia. Since then, a thousand sci-fi universes have resorted to Asian symbols and imagery as a shorthand for a technologically advanced future. Asian megacities have long served as the ultimate prop shops for cyberpunk: The neon-lit towers of Shanghai and the flashing Kanji logos of Tokyo have dressed the genre’s hyper-tech urban sprawls since its inception in the early 1980s.

Guardian of ancient glyphs in everspace