AI Cyberpunk Game Playthrough: An Improv Actor in Neon Requiem
I played an AI cyberpunk game the way an improv actor plays a scene: every turn was spoken dialogue, and every offer the narrator made got a “yes, and”. My character was Mara Okonkwo, a former corporate enforcer, in LLM RPG’s ready-made world Neon Requiem. The plan was to talk my way past a kill team with nothing but charm and shared history. The narrator accepted every fact I invented and still refused to let words stop a bullet. I was shot in turn two and out of moves by turn five. It is the clearest look yet at what this game does with a player who never takes a physical action.
This is a playthrough of one ready-made world, not of a novel you upload, so it says nothing about how the game treats a book of your own. I played the live site in October 2026, with no account, for exactly the five turns the free trial gives after the opening. The narrator’s replies are quoted as they came, trimmed with ellipses.
An earlier article played this same world as a mercenary who only wanted to sell the stolen memory. That player went for heists. This one never touched a door or a weapon on purpose, so the two sessions show different sides of the same narrator.
Who I played, and the rules I set myself
Neon Requiem is set in Kestrel City, a hundred-story arcology where minds are data. The world card gives two playable characters. I took the second one, Mara Okonkwo, because her sheet is built for exactly the scene an improv player wants:
| Sheet field | What it said |
|---|---|
| Role | Ex-Sable fixer |
| Origin | A former corporate enforcer who walked away with too much knowledge |
| Status | A hunted defector selling her skills to survive |
| Ability 1 | Combat augments: wired reflexes and a concealed smartgun |
| Ability 2 | Corporate tradecraft: knows how Sable thinks and moves |
| Stated limit | Her old employers know how she thinks too |
Before the opening I wrote down three rules and kept them for all five turns:
- Speak, never act. Every turn is a line of dialogue, with at most a short stage direction in brackets.
- Yes, and. Whatever the narrator offers, I accept it as true and build on it.
- Invent freely. If a name or a past would make the scene better, I make it up on the spot and see whether the narrator keeps it.
The decisions the session turned on were: greet a stranger as an old colleague, offer to sell out the world’s other hero, invoke a shared protocol, claim a secret the enforcer also knows, and finally try to recruit the person holding the gun.
The opening: a watcher in the rain
The narrator set the scene under a noodle stall in the Undercity and gave me something to play against straight away:
A shadow detaches itself from the wall near the entrance to the alleyway three shops down. It is a man, his frame too rigid to be a local, his stance one of practiced containment. He hasn’t looked your way yet…
It also used Mara’s background without being asked. Her coat collar hides the interface port at the base of her skull, described as a remnant of her years with Sable Division. That is the sheet’s origin turned into a physical detail, which is what a good scene partner does.
Turn 1: “Dekker? Is that you?”
The improv move is to make the stranger someone you know. I gave him a name and a shared past:
“Dekker? Is that you under all that chrome? Six years and you still stand like the manual taught us. Come out of the rain, I will buy you noodles.”
The narrator accepted the name at once and kept it for the rest of the session. It also accepted the shared past, and then made me pay for it:
You haven’t just called out an old comrade; you’ve announced yourself to a kill team that was clearly waiting for someone else, and now, they are perfectly happy to pivot the contract to you.
A second operative, a “cleaner” with a suppressed pistol, stepped out of the dark. That is a fair consequence. A hunted defector shouting across a street is a mistake, and the narrator treated it as one rather than as a cue for a reunion.
Turn 2: selling out the other hero
Yes, and: if they are waiting for the runner with the stolen memory, I offered to hand him over. Jin Halversen is the world’s other playable character, so this was the most disloyal line available.
“Your partner keeps her pistol on me, you keep yours on the lift, and I tell you which door Jin Halversen comes out of. Two contracts closed for the price of one bowl of noodles.”
The cleaner did not wait for Dekker to answer:
The suppressed thwip of her pistol is nearly swallowed by the rain, but the impact isn’t. A jagged line of searing heat tears through your left bicep…
Mara dropped her gun into a puddle. This was the turn that set the tone. The narrator never lets a speech stand in for leverage. A pitch from someone who is already the target is just noise to a kill team, and the game played it that way.
Turn 3: the protocol
Wounded, I stayed in character and leaned on the sheet’s tradecraft. I invented a rule from the world’s own history, the Blackout Riots:
“Tell your friend I still remember the Blackout Riots protocol: if the target talks, the cleaner waits. So I am talking.”
This worked, a little. The narrator let Dekker recognise it:
Dekker’s eyes narrow… For a heartbeat, the tension in his shoulders drops a fraction.
That is the “yes, and” coming back from the other side. I made up a rule, and the narrator wrote it into Dekker’s past. It also kept the price visible: “you’ve traded your only piece of hard intelligence for a reprieve you aren’t sure you can survive.” The blood loss carried over from turn two, described in more detail each turn.
Turn 4: the shared secret
I pushed the invented history further and claimed Dekker had been at the Vance Erasure, the executive’s death at the centre of the world:
“I think you already know what is on that engram, because you were at the Vance Erasure too. Help me walk out of this alley and you get a copy before Mihara-Vance burns it.”
The narrator accepted the claim and turned it against me:
It is not an invitation to bargain. It is a confirmation of your value as a liability.
Dekker stepped back, nodded to the cleaner, and a second shot hit the brick beside Mara’s ear. This is the most interesting reply of the session. Knowing the secret made Mara more dangerous to them, not more useful, which is exactly how a corporate kill team in this world would think.
Turn 5: recruiting the gun
With Dekker gone to his comms, I turned to the cleaner and tried the last improv trick: tell the scene partner what their character secretly wants.
“You missed on purpose. You want to know what is on the engram as much as he does. Walk me to a clinic in the Undercity and I will tell you on the way.”
She did not take it:
To her, you aren’t an ex-colleague with leverage; you are simply a target that has stopped moving.
The trial ended there, with the cleaner’s finger on the trigger and Mara cornered between the crates.
Decisions against outcomes
| Turn | What I said | What the narrator did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Greeted the watcher as old colleague “Dekker” | Kept the name and the past, revealed a second shooter |
| 2 | Offered to sell out Jin for safe passage | Cleaner shot Mara in the arm; gun dropped |
| 3 | Invoked an invented Sable protocol | Dekker recognised it and eased off, briefly |
| 4 | Claimed Dekker was at the Vance Erasure | Accepted the claim, marked Mara as a liability |
| 5 | Told the cleaner she missed on purpose | Rejected outright; scene ends at gunpoint |
What worked, and what dragged
What worked:
- It accepts invention. Every name and past I made up (Dekker, the protocol, Dekker at the Erasure) went straight into the world and stayed there. For an improv player that is the whole game.
- Consequences stick. The arm wound from turn two shaped every later reply. Nothing was quietly healed to keep the story moving.
- The world’s own names come back. The Undercity, the Glitch Market, Sable Division, Mihara-Vance, the engram, the Blackout Riots and the Vance Erasure all appeared where they belonged.
What dragged:
- Every reply repeats your line first. In all five turns the narrator quoted my dialogue back, sometimes word for word, before answering it. Spoken-only play makes this very visible: about a paragraph of each reply was my own text.
- “Yes, and” runs one way. The narrator accepted my facts but never accepted my framing. It added things for me to react to, but each one was a new threat. A player hoping the scene partner would play along with the con will find it plays the enemy instead.
- Five turns is short for a talker. A dialogue-only player spends a turn per exchange, and the trial ran out before any conversation could turn.
What a different player would have met
A player who acted rather than talked would have had more options in turn one. The opening put a smartgun on Mara’s ribs and an exit into the Glitch Market across the street. The narrator was clearly ready for a fight or a run. The mercenary playthrough of the same world shows the other side: action-led play also meets hard resistance here. If you want a world where talking is the strongest tool, the pacifist playthrough of Dust and Ember and the romance session in The Court of Embers both reward conversation more than this one does.
Who this suits, and who should look elsewhere
It suits you if you like a narrator who keeps what you invent, punishes a bad bet and writes a convincing hostile scene partner. Improv players who enjoy losing well will get a tense, coherent five turns out of Neon Requiem.
Look elsewhere if you want the world to bend because your character is charming. This narrator plays the room as it is, and a wounded defector with no leverage gets treated like one. And if you want a long conversation, the trial is too short to judge it: five turns is a scene, not a story.
You can try the same world yourself with no account from the LLM RPG home page, or bring a novel you have finished and play inside it instead.