Paul’s Top 10: Cyberpunk 2077
Written by Paul Lehman
*Please note that this article is related to Paul’s thoughts on the game belonging in his top 10 games of all time. Click here to see the post regarding the deep dive episode done on Cyberpunk 2077 revisited in 2022.
Yes I know, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 at the end of 2020 was a complete disaster. The game was riddled with so many bugs and technical issues that Sony even removed the game from the PlayStation store until it was fixed. Developer CD Projekt Red even had to settle class-action lawsuits and was subject to governmental investigations because of the debacle. I know for many people, this is the legacy and lasting memory of the game. It took time, but the game is now in a fantastic state at the time of this writing, with the first expansion, Phantom Liberty, right around the corner. Most of the issues have been fixed, and you’re far less likely to run into T-poses, random artifacts floating in the air, and texture glitches. The game has been largely reworked, and I would consider it a “must-play” game.
Despite all the things that Cyberpunk 2077 got wrong, the storyline and characters are absolutely top-notch. If you’re not familiar with the overall journey of the game, you play as V, an aspiring criminal in the fictional Night City in the year 2077. You are hired to steal a biochip called “the Relic” whose function is unknown. During the heist, the chip’s case becomes damaged, so V is forced to insert the chip into his/her/their cyberware (my first playthrough and “canonical” experience was as a male V, so the pronoun “he” will be used for the rest of this article). V returns the Relic to the fixer that hired you and is thanked with a bullet to the head, and your corpse is dropped off at the city dump.
Surprisingly, V suddenly awakens, brought back from the dead by the Relic. However, V starts to experience some very strange symptoms. He can see and interact with Johnny Silverhand, a long-dead terrorist rockstar who died decades earlier (voiced wonderfully by Keanu Reeves). In an attempt to learn what is happening to you, V tracks down and speaks to people from the corporation that designed the Relic. We learn that the Relic is a prototype of a program to give people the ability to transfer their conscience and memories into another body in order to live forever. It turns out that the Relic had been used on Johnny Silverhand as a way to imprison his consciousness, and when the Relic rebooted your body, it began a process to override V’s consciousness with Johnny’s.
Over the course of time, you begin to act and think more like Johnny. You can feel yourself slipping away, suffering a very slow and seemingly irreversible death. There is a lot to this story that we are yada yada yada-ing, but the real intrigue starts once you understand the situation and have to make some decisions about how to handle the end game.
Without spoiling the different endings, let’s just say that my ending had a very somber tone and was not what I would consider a happy ending. I wondered what mistakes I made that led to such a sour ending. I restarted loading old saves to make different decisions and realized that they were all more horrific than the initial ending I received. It turns out that there’s no clear-cut happy ending to this story. Initially, this rubbed me the wrong way, but I now recognize its genius. Night City is a metaphor for a future run entirely by greed and love of money, and anyone caught in that world is going to suffer consequences. When the bottom line and profits are valued more than people, tragedy awaits all but those at the top of the megacorporations. My V decided to leave Night City with his love interest at the end, but it was still assumed that V would die within a few weeks’ time. It remains to be seen how Phantom Liberty might rewrite or change this ending.
Cyberpunk 2077 provides a lot of memorable story in both the main quest and the side missions. In my opinion, it’s so well written that it belongs just below other futuristic sci-fi works like the Bladerunner movies and The Matrix. It’s also certainly one of the darkest games I’ve ever played, possibly only beaten out by Manhunt. It’s oftentimes very depressing, which is usually not what I look for in an escapist RPG, but the cleverness of the storytelling had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. I remember a side mission called Gig: Dirty Biz where I found a father and adult son who had been selling illegal “braindances” on the black market (recorded memories that could be re-experienced by someone else through a cybernetic chip). These were braindances recorded by people who murdered children, and these two were selling the experience as entertainment for others who wanted to know what it would feel like. Look…I always take a paragon/pacifist route when possible in RPGs, but when faced with pure evil like this when their motivation was to make a quick buck off something so ugly…I didn’t even hesitate and shot both immediately. Most games don’t have the courage (or maybe gall?) to include subject matters like that.
You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned the combat up to this point. The combat is fun and serviceable but is not the lasting legacy of Cyberpunk 2077. The skill tree has been reworked to be far more useable, and the game does a good job of letting you play with a style you prefer, whether that means stealth, melee weapons, range weapons, or hacking enemies’ cybernetic implants. The hacking method is the most unique, and my recommended style of play. There’s just something satisfying about hacking someone else’s grenade to explode while on their belt, or to give them “cyberpsychosis” where they start attacking other enemies for you.
Give Cyberpunk 2077 a chance, and relish in the story and the options presented to you. It will not give you the warm and fuzzies, but it will be a game that sticks with you because it presents you with so many options that are truly difficult to decide on. Sometimes you won’t even see the ramifications of your choices until later in the game, but the payoff is always worth the wait. I also highly encourage multiple playthroughs. Romance options and dialogue change dramatically between a male or female V playthrough (I remember being highly impressed when Johnny mentioned that my female V’s hormones were driving him crazy because he wasn’t used to them). If you gave the game a shot in 2020 and then gave up over technical issues, now’s the time to revisit it. V was given a second chance at life, and Cyberpunk 2077 deserves one as well.