Searching for a Reason to Survive in 'Cyberpunk 2077'

The original release of a Cyberpunk 2077 will be immortal, even as that trainwreck now no longer truly exists. That stinking trash fire of the game will live on forever in glitch compilation videos and tweets. History will probably not much remember this final version, which is a bit unfair. We should judge games based on their best selves, not their worst. Maybe in a year or two, some critic will dare to write a "Cyberpunk 2077 was good actually" take. But when a game launches this poorly, nothing will erase that initial reputation for total hysterical calamity. 

I did not play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch in late 2020, because I wanted the "real" Cyberpunk 2077, the Platonic Ideal Cyberpunk 2077, or at least the piece of code that could most approximate CD Projekt Red's dream vision for this title. The "next-gen version" of Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed so long you could probably call it the "current-gen version" at this point. It launched suspiciously quietly last month, just days before Horizon: Forbidden West and Elden Ring, two of the biggest games of the year. Most critical attention is still focused on the usual Twitter arguments that accompany any FromSoft title. So, I figured, I should follow my own path. I won't add much to the Elden Ring discourse, but I could try my hand on this old boy. Can a new coat of paint in the new Version 1.5 save this game? Or was it fundamentally broken even under the busted physics and incomplete ideas?

The good news is that this version feels like a completed work. All of the various systems are fully operational. A year of polish and some PS5 horsepower has made a functional product. It is still janky in many ways, but this is no longer a forty-car pileup we can rubberneck in abject horror as we drive by. The jank now is less an unplayable mess and more a lovable scamp of a game trying its best. It's adorably inconsistent. I ran into glitches of all kinds, luckily all of which were solved by simply restarting the game. There still some knee slappers of glitches, such as the time my DualSense controller would not stop snoring loudly. I also had to watch the ending cutscenes with a tutorial message stuck on the screen, a final victory of jank over the forces of polish and stability.

Forget the build-quality, the real question is this: Is Cyberpunk 2077 the game you wanted? Well, not really. Does it lives up to the near-decade of hype? No. Is this the SciFi answer to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, still arguably the gold standard for open world Western RPGs? No. Is it a solid combination of the lawless freedom of Grand Theft Auto and the mechanical freedom of immersive sims? No. If you come at this object demanding that this be The Witcher, or Deus Ex, or GTA, or any translation of the original tabletop RPG, you will be unhappy. Instead, Cyberpunk 2077 is a roughly thirty hour game, depending on your thirst for sidequests, full of pieces that are decent at best, barely acceptable at worst.

It is any fun to play? Well... not terribly so. The driving is awful. Every car feels roughly the same, the braking is always stiff, the acceleration is meaningless, and the music on the radio is universally terrible aside from the one song I really love and have been jamming to for days. The combat segments are full of stiff shooting galleries against uninteresting bullet sponges. I specc'd early on for stealth and hacking to sneak by. This was not out of an honest desire for pacifism or a more creative combat option (that does not exist). I just didn't want to do the FPS stuff, because it sucked. Your role-playing options are frustrating and made meaningless by the story decisions. The sidequests are rarely satisfying, they lack much player agency or moral statement. The greater story sucks too, actually. It is a bad mixture of various 90s SciFi films, and the better Cyberpunk 2077 would be not playing this game, but instead watching those films. (Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days is brilliant and underrated, please track that down.) Your character, always named "V" is probably the biggest issue in the game, and I'll get to why in a moment.

Ultimately, this is all building up to a fantasy that does little to appeal to me. So why even talk about Cyberpunk 2077 at all? I could end it here and say "it works, but it still kinda sucks". However, there is something interesting about this game. It achieves a unique culture, a kind of aggressive ambivalence to your existence, which could have been the jumping off point to a bigger statement. Sadly, it never takes that leap to an actual conclusion. Cyberpunk 2077, however, ends up offering a very different kind of fantasy by the end, one that strangely seems to be in direct opposition to the very fetishes at play in the cyberpunk genre.

To prepare for this review, I needed to time travel to sixty years before this game's titular setting, the year 2018. I cannot recall in my time following games criticism that any title made more of an impression and generated more hype than Cyberpunk 2077 did that E3. From the usual enthusiast press outlets to more critical leftist circles, that game was THE story of that summer. Everybody was buzzing. The Waypoint Vice staff, have several mottos, one of which is "do not give in to astonishment". This one time, they gave in, and they were astonished hard. I have never seen Austin Walker more blown away by a demo than he was that E3. They talked for nearly an hour about CD Projekt Red's presentation, which was closed doors at first, then fully revealed to the publich months later. This is probably the real reason I'm here writing this now. Here in 2022, we can still see the light of that initial explosion of joy and enthusiasm, even as we are grimly aware that this light came from a star that died far away, long ago.

Now, I am not claiming that Austin or his co-host Patrick Klepek were fooled or taken in by a hustle. Because everything those early demos promised are in the final game. The scenarios they discuss in that video are exactly the ones I played, beat for beat. They described a universe that was ultimately achieved. They saw in Cyberpunk 2077 the potential for something great, and the early hours of the final Version 1.5 product still has that potential. Unfortunately, this game never gets further than that.

Cyberpunk 2077's setting is Night City, a fictional post-apocalyptic version of LA. I'll admit, in this most complete version, Night City is a technical achievement. I have never before been more impressed by a game's ability to simulate the vast hustle and bustle of a living city. Driving is terrible and unconvincing. But if you take the time to walk down the streets of Night City, it feels authentic. This is why the game was built in first-person, so that this future world can awe you. I walked a mile from a conversation with a fixer back to my apartment and felt like I was just an anonymous pedestrian who could be in any city. It is a place greater than myself, greater than my V.

Sure, the illusion is often fleeting. You'll see the same chubby man twice around a corner. The children are just shrunken adults. If an NPC has a lips icon over their head, that means they're a prostitute you can "enjoy" for $100, a mechanic that exists purely for the emptiest and saddest kinds of titillation. I hit the wrong shoulder button while learning the controls and accidentally tossed a grenade at my feet. This caused the Night City cops to teleport instantly and fire a downright Verhoevenian level of ammunition right into my character's chest, killing me instantly. (This is a universe where the state has all but ceased to exist yet state violence is maximally efficient.) But if let yourself buy the illusion you'll see open markets and noodle stalls and restaurants that all add to the verisimilitude of an economy, a history, a density of detail.

If you cross the street without looking, you might get hit by a car. That's hilarious every single time.

There could be a version of Cyberpunk 2077 where your overall smallness and insignificance would be the point. V starts the game as a low-level crook (regardless of your initial choices, you will be forced into the role of a classic Street Samurai), and at least at first, Cyberpunk 2077 keeps reminding you of how not-special you are. Your first series of missions see you running into various corporate armies with far higher levels than your own. I love that the game is daring you to try the combat out. You just cannot win these fights. If you compare V to Geralt, the difference in the way the world treats you is stark. When you played The Witcher 3, you were somebody. You were a guy who could be sarcastic in the presence of kings. V is nobody. V is a guy or gal with a shitty apartment and a cheap car, and they seem lucky to even have that. Nobody is afraid of you, but they make it clear again and again that you should be afraid of them.

And of course, it was not going to stay like this forever. Of course, in any version of this SciFi crime story, it would have to eventually become rags to riches as V climbs the ladder from filthy little huckster to a notorious gangster. The true aim of this kind of game is acquiring loot and gear to customize your arsenal and even your body itself to become a fearsome living weapon. It is not about affecting vast social change because cyberpunk as a genre really does not have a social agenda or radical politics in mind. Any little burns you get on "the man" are purely superficial. Beating the Corpos is as likely as killing God, and this is not a JRPG world where friendship overpowers deities. As V, you'll hear about vast swathes of environmental devastation or incredible corruption on every level of society or how even the rich bitches with Cadillac health plans have a 10% coinsurance. V doesn't care a bit. The oppressive system is part of the entertainment - just digital video game bootstraps by which you can pull yourself up and tower over the mountain. Why solve social problems when social problems are the most fun kind of video game boss? You don't even need to monetize the rot, you can just game it.

Cyberpunk 2077 immediately ceases to be interesting or have any edge in its narrative the moment you lift the cybernetic boot off of your face by the power of your pure atomized individual badass will. This was always going to happen, I can't imagine any version of this game not doing this. And Cyberpunk 2077 does it particularly poorly.

SPOILERS from this point on. You were warned.

Unfortunately, Cyberpunk 2077 wastes no time ignoring the best parts of its genre aesthetic. The skyscrapers are supposed to be the titanic bars of your late-21st century prison. Instead, within mere hours, V is at the top of said skyscrapers, pulling off a heist against the heads of the Arasaka Corporation, this distressingly Japanophobic vision of a "family Empire". It goes wrong, but you still are the key witness in a major scandal. You were in the room when the Emperor was murdered by his son, making you instantly one of the great kingmakers of this city. On top of that, you wind up with the "coolest" rock star in history, Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) loaded into your head.

Already, this feels like an impossible amount of Heat to dump on your little V, who a few hours earlier was cowered into a corner by middle-management types. Your best hope for survival seemingly should be to flee Night City and never come back, since odds are the Arasaka goons will murder you and every person you've ever met simply as standard operating procedure. The fact you keep living in Night City, doing jobs for any random sleazeball that calls you on the phone totally breaks the narrative. It tells me the story has gone too big too fast. The threats all ended up empty. I fucked around, I found out, and here I am, with no consequences, able able to do whatever I want in this playground of uninspired violence. V is no longer tethered to the world, they're an agent outside of it, free forever, just killing time until I bother to finish up the mainline quests. That ruins everything.

Worse, every character you've met up until this point gets "zero'd". This includes your best friend and partner, Jackie, who is a legitimately great guy and probably should have just been the main character. Several arcs are left dead in the cold for shock value. Did you like Evelyn Parker and her double-dealing femme fatale vibe? Now she is reduced to merely a victim of sexual violence and disappears from the story, not necessarily into a fridge but a bathtub. Aint it fun? Replacing them is Johnny inside your head, who is this broken record of anti-capitalist speeches that are painfully adolescent and shallow. Again, Cyberpunk is not a game with actual politics. You can really see the limits of the developer's worldview when they let their "revolutionary" take the mic, only to shout angry nothings.

The biggest problem, however, is the driving motivation. Just becoming the best possible asshole in the world of assholes was not terribly compelling, so I'm glad Cyberpunk 2077 aimed a bit higher. However, the overall quest for 70% of this game is not about saving the world or changing society or naked revenge. It's only about saving V. It is an ironic twist on Johnny Mnemonic, the 1995 cyberpunk movie starring Keanu Reeves about a man dying from too much data in his head. Only with V, they're dying from Keanu Reeves himself being the killer data. Your goal now becomes to follow every lead, break every head, and do whatever it takes to save yourself from becoming Keanu Reeves. (Which is a lot less cool than it sounds.)

You cannot have a deep personality conflict between Johnny Silverhand and V. As a faceless body who carries your POV camera on their shoulders, V is a cypher that barely exists as a character at all, and Johnny is the living embodiment of the "ultra-cool" Street Samurai fantasy this game wants you to indulge in. Can you find the personality clash here?

The bigger issue is this: why does V want to live? What in V's life is so important that they'd be willing to kill hundreds of people and topple globalist empires to keep going? Who would weep the day V disappeared from their life? Cyberpunk 2077 made it clear: very few will cry over you, and if they do, it won't be for very long. Night City would snack on your corpse like so many empty calories and shit you out into the sewer. Since so much of Cyberpunk 2077 relies on me as a role-player caring about what I'm doing and putting context into the events, it is a real problem when the fundamental issue of the game is one that means nothing to me. V is so desperate to save a life that was utterly empty. V is such a nobody that the whole Punk with Cyber Powers thing was not even their own dream, that was Jackie's thing. Jackie wanted to be the legend of the Night City underworld. V just had nothing better to do, so followed Jackie's footsteps.

Is this really all V wants? To keep staying in a shitty bachelor apartment to save up their pennies to buy a different lonely condo across town? To buy a slightly nicer car that is just as awful to drive as their current one? To keep adding up the numbers on their stat sheets with various enhancements in filthy back alley medical centers that never truly give any satisfaction or a true command of the flesh? In Cyberpunk 2077 you cannot even transcend gender, let alone the limits of humanity or the physical form. V's body is a conservative humanoid construct, a temple of flesh and machine, but still a temple that you can neither desecrate or evolve beyond. You gain Street Cred, which is not true respect or impact on the world, but a pure abstraction that lets you buy more RAM for your head. V could spend hours in Night City 100%ing every aspect of this place, achieving every quest, doing mercenary work for the cops, collecting trinkets and bullshit, and I have no clue why they would want to do any of it.

This is one of the saddest scenarios any video game has ever conjured for me. I kept playing through the main campaign of this game looking for any reason, anything at all why V would want to keep living this life. The game was certainly never aware of this issue, it simply assumes that V would want to keep being V a priori. I tried my best to guide V through a brothel to follow a lead and had to slaughter every guard in there when one of them opened fire on me without warning. (The game then yelled at me for being so blunt and violent.) Why did V think those people's lives were less important than their own? Why did V feel like surviving that gun fight? I had no answer, but kept going. 

Because luckily, I did find one.

The one thing I can say Cyberpunk 2077 actually does well is romance. This is especially surprising considering how edgelord and tasteless much of this game is. Night City is decorated with references to MILFs and gross objectification of East Asian women on practically every wall. No, none of it is "ironic". No level of self-aware metacommentary changes the blunt fact that these exploitative elements are part of the meathead fantasy. And this even extends to the parts of this game I like, because the romantic partner I chose is introduced leaning over a station wagon's front hood so her curvy ass is centered on the camera. This is straight out of Michael Bay's drooling playbook. The fact this relationship ended up being a weirdly tender one is perhaps the most shocking thing of all. This is still the game where banging prostitutes is treated with as much weight as the endless amounts of liquor your character can drink?

V's partner in my campaign ended up being Panam Palmer, an ambitious mercenary from a Nomad clan of war veterans and truckers called the Aldecaldos. Her quest line is the only one that takes you out to the deserts around Night City. It starts as a typical violent quid pro quo. She got scammed by some criminals she was running with and needs your help blowing their heads off. You need her help murdering some Corpo guys to find an engineer who might be able to Right Click + Delete Keanu Reeves out of your brain. But what's remarkable about this storyline, unlike basically any other one I could find, is that Panam had a family that had her back. She's on the outs with Aldecaldos at first. Her style is a bit more aggressive than they can take. However, when the chips are down, when she needs people, they're there.

Compare of course, to my V, whose chips are down right now, and has nobody to call on but casual acquaintances or clients. Night City defies all attempts to build support networks or found families, that's cheating the game. When one of Panam's family is killed after your quest goes sideways, she's legitimately devastated. When her father figure is kidnapped into an enemy base, she'll do anything to save him, without considering profit or advantage. (Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 needs to offer a free motorbike to add to your endless collection of junk so you'll do a quest where you attend a funeral for Jackie.) Panam calls you in that optional quest because you're the most reckless asshole she knows. Later she wants to steal what is basically a Metal Gear, and who else does she know that would is proudly tell the camera "I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is the Gundamjack"? 

At the end of the game, when the Keanu code was close to exploding my brain, who else was I supposed to call? Nobody has shown any indication they want to fight for anybody else except Panam.

Panam and V also end up having remarkably sweet chemistry. Despite multiple skeevy options to be way too handsy too quickly, Cyberpunk 2077 knows a romance needs time. The rule is you can't have sex until the third optional quest mission date, everybody knows that. It is not even just Panam you're romancing, at a certain point. Yeah, you get to sit together by the fire, holding each other at night. But also, you're surrounded by Aldecaldos. It is the first sense of actual community Cyberpunk 2077 ever gave. That you're not just surrounded by something bigger than yourself, but part of something bigger than yourself.

V needed an identity, Panam needed somebody that believed in her. Can this be an actually mutually supportive adult relationship that achieves more than bare tits as a reward for the right dialog choices? Yeah, it is. V, for once, stops using criminal cliches as a replacement for a personality, Panam drops her sarcastic banter, these characters end up vulnerable and human with each other. A game this relentlessly ugly found a way to be beautiful.

Panam and her entire quest are optional. You can play V however you want. You can bang one of the other romance options, or become King Turd of the Night City Shit Mountain. Have fun. V can have everybody and everything, but I'll never why they would want any of it. I'm not saying that Panam saves Cyberpunk 2077, but at least she did save my V. That's something, at least.

There are multiple endings to Cyberpunk 2077. Fans seem disappointed that none of the endings give a fully black and white "they all lived happily ever after". The game fumbles some kind of message that this dystopia is all about compromise, when it is provably not that at all. It is about pure consumption untethered from a state or society. V could devour the whole city and I don't think they'd have found a single honest moment in the entire conquest.

In the ending I found, which is probably as close as there is to a Golden Ending, V ends up with less than six months to live. It is ineffectively bittersweet. However, what impressed me, was that my ending is the one where V and Panam leave Night City forever. The Aldecaldos ride off into the sunset with a fat load of Arasaka loot and a floating doom mech at the end of their caravan. There is no paradox in fact that the parts of Cyberpunk 2077 I loved the most were basically running as fast as my legs could take me out of Cyberpunk 2077. Whether V lives for another day, six months, or an infinite length of time is irrelevant. Because at least I knew why V would want to live at all. 

It's a shame V won't live, but then again, who does? There's a vast country out there far away from Night City. V is heading there now with a lover at his side and a family that is there for the both of them. The morning light is just starting to rise over the horizon and there's a Quickhack Tutorial Menu glitching on the top left corner of my screen. Truly an idyllic moment. Outside of Night City is where better things are truly possible.