In a quiet alley off a noisy street, a stranger hands you a USB drive. If you want to see what's on it, you plug it in. That's how Radiotext begins, the cyberpunk hacking RPG by Alp Arslan that has been available on Steam since September 28, 2026. The list price is £9.99 / $11.99 / €11.99, with a 30 percent launch discount during its first two weeks. Bonfire PR announced it on Games Press with just the right tone: heads up, hackers, the static has cleared.
Radiotext isn't a shooter with neon lights and katanas. It's '90s software that lets you communicate over radio waves. You enter an abandoned network as an outsider; by talking to users, linking forgotten channels, and decoding frequencies, you gradually piece together what the hell happened on this old network and whose side you're on when the conversation turns political. There are activists, lies, far too much honesty, and the suspicion of a mole. If you ever got hooked on Duskers, Hypnospace Outlaw, or S.P.L.I.T, the pitch is looking you dead in the eye.
The developer comes from tabletop role-playing—having worked on Historica Arcanum: Serenade for the Damned, a Silver ENNIE winner for Best Long Adventure—and it shows in how he treats conversation as a system. Paths branch out; a blessing in one chat can turn into a curse three nodes later. There are hidden options that don't appear underlined in any menu. The interface is a retro terminal with typing mechanics and sound effects that smell like old plastic. You can recolor the UI and move nodes around. The promised playtime is honest: three to four hours for a full playthrough, featuring multiple endings and a network that can still be explored even after the story "ends."
The neatest part of its technical design is practically an engineering joke. Even though it looks 3D, Radiotext runs in 2D and keeps install size, RAM, and VRAM close to 200 MB, even at 4K with realistic environments. It's the kind of detail that wins over anyone playing on handhelds or PCs that aren't packing the latest RTX. It was also built with modding in mind from day one: both the demo and the full game include a guide to creating your own stories, NPCs, and puzzles. There's also an asynchronous social layer reminiscent of notes in Dark Souls or Death Stranding: an in-game, X-like social network where player messages mingle with NPC posts. The network, quite literally, never sleeps.
Steam lists the title as Adventure, Indie, and RPG, featuring achievements, Steam Workshop, and Family Sharing. A free demo remains available for anyone wanting to test the static before paying. Support starts on Windows, with listings for macOS (Apple Silicon) and SteamOS/Linux in the published requirements as well. This isn't a AAA game disguised as an indie: it's a small project with its own voice, PR managed by Bonfire, and a press kit on Drive for anyone covering the launch. In a feed saturated with hundred-hour early access titles, an afternoon-length cyberpunk game with a 30 percent discount feels almost subversive.
The question posed by the game—and its press release—is the same: do you join the cyberactivist uprising against the megacorps, or do you just listen to the radio? Radiotext isn't going to settle that question for you with a thousand-node skill tree. It will settle it through what you type into the terminal and who you choose to believe when the signal gets fuzzy. Alp Arslan delivers a short, moddable, inexpensive package right in the middle of a discount window. If your idea of hacking is less "breaching firewalls via QTE" and more "reading between the lines on a ghostly BBS," the USB drive is already sitting in your Steam inventory. You just have to decide whether you plug it in tonight or let the static wait for another day.
Bonfire PR is keeping the press kit open and the developer available for interviews; it's the kind of small launch that survives if the indie press and narrative streamers catch wind of it in time. At PixelPress, we're covering it because the feed can't just be forty-five-gigabyte remasters and hundred-and-forty-hour early access games. Sometimes the news of the day fits into two hundred megabytes and a single question typed into a terminal. Radiotext is live on the store. From here on out, the static is yours.