'We Do Not Let You Into Every Building for Your Own Good!' — No Law's Dense Cybergrunge City Might Just Be the Most Alive Open World Ever Created

No Law is an ambitious project. It’s a Cyberpunk-style sci-fi action adventure set in a city packed with thousands of NPCs and buildings you can enter. But it’s not on the same scale as CD Projekt’s sprawling Night City. Rather, Port Desire goes for density and fidelity over sheer scale. That’s a choice Neon Giant co-founders and co-creative directors Tor Frick and Arcade Berg made early on in development of this promising follow-up to cyberpunk twin-stick shooter The Ascent, which won plaudits for its attention to detail. Now, with the perspective shifted to first-person and an open world city to explore, No Law doubles down and expands on everything that made The Ascent so good. No Law showed up at this year's Unreal Fest (it’s being made using Unreal Engine 5), with an impressive tech demo, below. Ahead of the reveal, I spoke to Frick and Berg to get more insight into what they’re trying to achieve and what it all means for the player. There’s plenty of talk about Port Desire being the “most alive” open world city ever created, but how will this relatively modestly sized developer manage it? With physics that don’t reset, multiple interconnected systems that govern the behavior