Keylocker game director reveals its connections to Guitar Hero and Bong Joon-Ho

Keylocker
(Image credit: Moonana)

Keylocker is an upcoming cyberpunk RPG with an emphasis on the punk, with influences that range from plastic-instrument rhythm to anti-capitalist satire.

The Kickstarter campaign for Keylocker finished with just under $60,000 raised in October, and game director Nana Moon recently spoke with PLAY Magazine to explain how it's the kind of game that never could have happened without crowdfunding: "Keylocker makes investors run for the hills; the same goes for publishers as well," Moon said.

In Play's latest Insider segment (you can pick up latest issue of PLAY here for even more from the interview), Moon explains how Keylocker is meant to be a kind of cyberpunk that doesn't just cast a wary eye toward the future, and instead coexists with technology of the past and even mythological beings. You play as "a powerless girl with a bad attitude and anger issues about to burst" and, to be fair, her anger is justified - she just broke out of jail after being imprisoned for playing guitar too well in a society where music is illegal.

"It's about social mobility, of going up from the lowest point to the upper layers, and fighting your way across the system which tries to shove you back down at every minute," Moon says. "Keylocker is about a huge struggle in which you must make the most use of your resources and push yourself upwards in this social pyramid."

"I've been a huge fan of Bong Joon-Ho (director of Parasite) ever since his 2000's movie Barking Dogs Never Bite," Moon says. "I think both me and him are always talking about capitalism and societal classes while kind of seeing it all as a big joke. I think we are both fed up with how the system works."

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.