The juvenile delights of Cyberpunk 2077

As I blasted through my second playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, a part of my brain would gnaw at chores unfinished and meals uneaten, and then I’d reënter reality and it would be 2am and I’d have cranked out another five hours gunrunning around the neon-soaked streets of Night City. It felt like playing games as a high schooler, when I would blow past homework deadlines in match after match of Dota 2, only to confront said obligations when the sun rose the next day. I have been playing a lot of Cyberpunk lately, so much so that I missed the extremely lofty two-posts-a-month goal I set for this blog in February. The game was, for a time, occupying my brain with a sort of feverish totality.

Based on the tabletop series of the same name by Mike Pondsmith, you play as V, a mercenary looking to make a name for themselves in a corrupt and corrupting future metropolis unimaginatively called Night City, a locale bursting to the seams with gangs and fixers and light and noise and guns and hyper-sexual advertising. Circumstances conspire in such a way that, during the platonic ideal of A Job Gone Wrong, your best friend gets murdered and a digital clone of Johnny Silverhand, an old-school punk rocker-cum-terrorist, gets implanted in your head, where he starts to slowly kill you.

For most of its early life, the game lived in a sorry state of ignominy, after an utterly shambolic release in December 2020 which saw the game pulled from the Playstation store for being buggy to the point of uselessness. Developers CD Projekt Red have spent the last four years patching the game into usability, with a steady march of improvements, updates, and a major expansion in the form of Phantom Liberty. The game as it exists now is more or less the game that was promised during its breathless marketing run—huge, varied, narratively rich, and minimally buggy (but still plenty buggy, mind you; more than once I had to google around to find a Reddit thread to solve some bizarre issue I encountered—quests only triggering if you went to the opposite end of the map, or the combat music only going away after you hire a sex worker, that sort of thing). It’s a visual feast on a next-gen console—with my fridge of an Xbox Series X, the game makes a meal out of 4K HDR, with lights shimmering on the pavement as you drive by, weather effects complicating and enhancing the vistas in front of you.

On the surface, there’s not a ton about Cyberpunk that’s terribly unique. In drawing on a preëxisting TTRPG system which is itself wholly indebted to its identically-named genre predecessor, the game quickly ties itself into some very serious knots in an attempt to convince the audience that it, too, is some serious business. It is, after all, our future.

At nearly every opportunity, narratively and mechanically, Cyberpunk 2077 is asking you who you want to be. The game’s missions can be approached from enough angles that it feels as if the player has some genuine agency, making real character-based choices about how to approach a missions, even if the reality of those choices is almost always a stat check that blocks a door or a conversation option. Conversations tend to be binary, but with enough realistically fleshed-out options to warrant a sense of completeness, of hewing to the lived reality of the player-character and their intentions. The mere inclusion of Johnny’s engram, boiling away in V’s skull, creates a third axis upon which relationships and accomplishments are tested, commented upon, and broken. Narrative variability easily flows to its mechanical endpoints—guns are fluid and varied, quickhacks are fun and impactful, and the variety of upgrades and status effects available at each ripperdoc’s clinic allow the player to fine-tune what kind of protagonist they’ll eventually become.

The game is also a blisteringly stupid experience. Beyond its binaristic approach to gender—sexism and transphobia are alive and well within Night City’s borders, and there’s a healthy dollop of utterly boring “hey look, titties!” energy that permeates everything from the character design to the in-world billboards—the genuinely interesting material within the game is always buried underneath some extremely lame shit that really thinks it’s saying something. Nowhere is this more glaring than in the game’s main conflict, where the business surrounding Johnny Silverhand and the Arasaka Corporation and the Soulkiller (a kind of digital repository of people’s souls that seems rather horrifying) is obviated in two ways—first by naming the Big Awful Technology be called “Soulkiller,” a name so transparent stupid it rivals Mr. Robot‘s “Evil Corp” for bluntness; second, by the demands of the game itself. Cyberpunk 2077 can never create a truly cruel world, because creating something as abjectly cruel as is implied by the circumstances around you wouldn’t be fun to play. V is surrounded by abject wealth and bitter poverty, and can do nothing about either, because that would make the player-character power fantasy grind to a halt. Plenty of missions ask V to incapacitate a cyberpsycho, someone whose implanted modifications are so extensive that they drive their owner mad, but that’s never a problem for V. V can hotswap new lungs and arms and eyes and skeletons until the cows come home. Hay is made about systemic change and Johnny’s desire to reënact his one night of glory, where he and his companions nuked Arasaka Tower in an attempt to bring Night City’s biggest corpos to their knees. But the nuke didn’t kill the important people, just the normal ones. The wheel kept turning.

From the moment V meets Johnny, they are dying, but outside of plot-related blackouts, that dying is never comminicated mechanically. Johnny is, effectively, cancer, or any other terminal illness that eats you out from the inside, and instead of confronting the bone-deep ache of that reality, you crucify a guy for views. Like, I am really not joking about that. You meet a murderer who, for his execution, has found God and partnered with a film company to create an immersive braindance of his literal crucifixion. And then you crucify him for views. You even get to drive the nails into his hands yourself while reciting Biblical verse.

Even its widely-praised expansion, the thing that reclaimed Cyberpunk 2077 in the eyes of a skeptical gaming public and elevated it to the position of Finally Worth A Purchase, is a bizarre 80s inspired thriller pastiche starring Idris Elba in an utterly thankless role, one where you get recruited into the Future CIA and have to rescue the president of the New United States after her plane crashes into Dogtown, an independent militarized enclave within Night City’s borders. If Night City is meant to be a neon warning sign highlighting the evils of wealth inequality and the encroachment of privately-owned security forces on everyday life, then Dogtown is those ideas cranked up to eleven and drowned in a bucket of libertarian-owned Monster Energy. The whole thing is so brazenly simplistic in its construction that one imagines the developers’ twelve-year-olds doing all the brainstorming while high on Capri Suns, were it not for Dogtown’s own miserable contradictions. It is an experience where, after infiltrating the highest echelons of society and seeing the rot at the center, the final confrontation takes place (in one of the expansion’s branching plotlines) as you walk to a shuttle the Moon. In space.

As a lurid, ludic experience the game is often delightful, thrilling even, but never truly shakes off the demands of its third-person action-RPG forbearers—for all of its branching mechanical pathways, it eventually lumbers back to, as William Gibson put it, “GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future.” Which is great! GTA is fun! But, lost in the game’s very serious conversations about loss of self and capital and freedom is the fact that, with enough money and a visit to the right ripperdoc, you can tell people to commit suicide via hacks, or block bullets with your katana while you dodge between police cars with lightning quickness.

Cyberpunk-the-genre’s enduring problems are all outgrowths of its late-70s and early-80s creative genesis, when authors melded the influence of ascendent East Asian economies with the oppressive advance of neoliberalism and rapid advances in computer technology to imagine a dismal future where the self is commodified in its entirety.

Cyberpunk-the-game’s enduring problem is that it is a dumb guy’s idea of a Smart Guy Game, one that stays firmly locked in that Future-GTA territory. Cyberpunk 2077 contains larger ideas that it shares with its progenitors, especially regarding the commodification of self, but those ideas are always qualified by the fact that, if you hit the pause button and take a look at the map, there’s about a dozen different ripper clinics where, if you just sit down and spend some time commodifying yourself, you’ll get Tier 5+ Zappy Knife Arms.

It’ll only cost your soul.

More tk,

Luis