Note: This text is written with non-gamer audiences in mind. As such, it contains explanations gamers may consider unnecessary. It contains a lot of spoilers, which may damage your initial impression of the game if you intend to play it in the future. It also omits a lot of content which I have missed due to making just a single complete playthrough, which cost me 120 hours. I don’t intend on replaying the game until at least the next year, so I don’t know what it contains in those story branches I have not chosen.
“The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.” - the intro to William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”.
Punk is not only a rebellion against the establishment or a weird subculture with mohawk haircuts, but also an extremist cultural concept. Something which exists is conceptualized, “maxxed” to the limits of its hypothetical influence, and explored. Among all punks, cyberpunk is the most organic and logical.
Steampunk, a world of Victorian-era industrialist supremacy, never manages to rise above the comic book level of complexity in its many video game incarnations. Raypunk, a world where mid-20th century science overachieved its objectives, is very niche and only has been fully realized in a few passable movies of the 1970s.
Each part of cyberpunk lore is intuitively understandable to modern consumers. Those older than 30 still remember the unfulfilled expectations of Japan replacing America as the world’s hegemon, while those younger can plausibly imagine such a perspective, albeit with stronger Chinese influence. Corporations have not replaced national states as jurisdiction сenters yet, so the war between citizens of Sony and citizens of McDonald's is unlikely to happen in our lifetime. But it is fun to imagine such conflicts. The reduction of physical activities in favor of virtual ones is a prediction that materialized in full. And punks the subculture are still where the genre’s father William Gibson found them – drug-addicted wretches, hostile to the classical understanding of beauty and honor.
Gibson himself is an active social media user, posting on X/Twitter as @GreatDismal. In this role, he is hardly distinguishable from another influential science fiction author Stephen King. Both are predictable liberal yes-men with zero difference from the content of CNN’s newsreels. Knowing the impact of these two on the spread of distrust to all possible American rivals in our world, we can look with fresh eyes at the role of Japan in the cyberpunk world. While to non-Americans like myself all the cool-looking high-tech people speaking Japanese in the center of New York is a novelty first, everything else second, it is clear that they were meant to be undesirable aliens to Americans. The pro-Western geopolitical orientation of Japan saved them from overt disrespect in this world, that’s the role for whatever country with Moscow and Siberia in it, yet the bias is present and can be increased or decreased depending on relations with Japan in the real world. I read all the books from Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, the core canon of the genre, around the age of 20. I remember liking them but never had the desire to read them again. The video game we will be talking about is most influenced by the last book of the Sprawl trilogy, “Mona Lisa Overdrive”. Both are centered around the theme of consciousness, and whether the virtual copy of it can be considered the same person as its original owner, even if copying was done flawlessly, with the preservation of all original behavioral patterns and memories.
In 1988, a Black American game designer and a bachelor of science in behavioral psychology Mike Pondsmith compiles this setting in a tabletop role-playing game, claiming to be unaware of the content of Gibson’s books and being influenced by the more obscure novel “Hardwired” by Walter Jon Williams, who will later work together with Pondsmith to enhance his universe. I find this difficult to believe, considering many stylistic and political similarities to Gibson’s work.
A well-crafted role-playing setting must be more logical than a book setting because of its non-linearity. A writer can afford an unexplained whim in a book, but a game player is in a constant process of making decisions based on his understanding of the game world. Unlike shooter games, where most decisions are of a technical nature, role-playing games allow deep ethical deliberations. Best game worlds are both exotic and understandable. Pondsmith is very uneven in his explanation of various trends – he handles business and technology well but is weaker when it comes to politics. Frankly, I have read better justifications of hypothetical political timelines at alternate history forums than what he comes up with in most cases.
His world diverged from ours in 1990. Berlin Wall still falls and the Soviet Union still loses the Cold War but only the Baltic republics go their own way and the country somehow continues to be looked upon as a beacon for radical leftist movements across the globe. Japan assumes its rightful throne as a hegemon. The United States ceased to exist in a series of confusing military and civil conflicts, the continuity of which is probably the weakest point in the lore.
Meta-narrativeness of the game strikes us immediately after the first launch. We enter a story about corporations created by a corporation named CD Projekt from Poland, European Union. Everything that is allowed and not allowed comes from there. We begin with choosing the biological characteristics of our character. Because trans rights are human rights we can create a man with vagina or penis alike. The only thing that matters for in-game people, or NPCs as gamers call them, is the voice of your character. Voice determines your gender and romance options. Then we get to choose one of the three lifepaths, a variable that determines your character’s background, starting position, and specific dialogue options. These are rural anarchist Nomads, city dweller Streetkids, and ambitious corporate slaves Corpos.
The choice of these names is interesting and probably an Easter Egg in itself, hinting at either awareness of or interconnection with the fairly fresh book “Philosophical Posthumanism” by New-Yorkian Gender Studies specialist Francesca Ferrando and works of her preface writer Rosi Braidotti. Ferrando exploits the Nietzschean genealogical method and femsplains the posthuman perspective as a praxis of “nomadic becoming”. Braidotti defines nomadic becomings as “the process of affirmation of the unalterably positive structure of difference, unhinged from the binary system that traditionally opposed it to Sameness, where complexity and multiplicity are constituents of difference and the thinking subject is not a profound essence or spirit, but rather a collective assemblage, a relay-point for a web of complex relations that displace the centrality of ego-indexed notions of identity”. Even without these girls, the nomad archetype has been looked upon as a liberal ideal since the late 1960s and “Easy Rider” movie, as it represents freedom from everything at once. This view was strengthened in a recent Academy Award winner, “Nomadland”, which is “Easy Rider” for aging women. Corpo archetype is actually neither anti-capitalist nor pro-capitalist. To old-school Marxists, who saw the ideal society as a big factory under worker control, he is a disciplined and responsible member of society. Streetkid is an ideological middle ground between the two, someone who champions neither order nor liberation.
Looking for the most transgressive experience and nurturing my ego-indexed notions of identity I chose the Corpo lifepath, knowing only too well that being pro-corpo is a major corpo sin. Thankfully, this character woke up working for Arasaka Corporation, so my real-life Japanophilia was satisfied from the start. Playing for Yanks from Militech would drastically change my playthrough. The corporate culture of Arasaka was cool enough to instill a fervor in me, an eagerness to live and die for its glory. Even when my ass was dumped as I was fired for plotting to assassinate superior of my superior at the latter’s request, after just a few hours into the story, I felt no bitterness.
After playing through “The Witcher” trilogy by the same developer several times, I expected a similar pace. But that was not the case. Whereas in “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” the story unfolds across several geographic hubs, allowing you to do some important things for a bit, then allowing you to do some unimportant things for a bit, the narrative of this game expands in unexpected ways. By the time you’re presented with a main job “The Heist,” you have barely learned the basics of gameplay and know next to nothing about the world you are in. You know it’s a city called Night City, a cheesy way to combine the darkness of the city’s nature with the surname of its founder, WASP capitalist Richard Night. You know it is artificially multicultural, a tabletop trick to make this setting relatable to all possible ethnicities. You know you’d rather ditch your Kowloon-like starting apartment for the one at Corpo Plaza as soon as possible. So you sign up and get shattered by the long-reaching consequences of that job. You get killed and then resurrected by cutting-edge technology - engram, a digitized human psyche designed to restore human consciousness in a new biological body. From now on you’re the host of a new persona, which slowly but surely overwrites your original persona.
For players who have chosen either of two other lifepaths, this situation plays out in a very cunning way. Johnny is a perfect Nomad and near-perfect Streetkid. For male characters of these lifepaths he is everything you can only dream to become. And since he is generous enough to keep some remnants of you alive when he takes over for good, such players might be tempted to give in and just become Johnny.
The rest of the game is spent in trying to retain your identity and finding allies who might be able to stop the corrupting effect of engram technology. Apart from major corporations, there are various mafia factions; fixers who hire you for barely legal or illegal jobs; subcultures, and ethnic groups. You can influence their standing and well-being among other groups through both action and inaction. Sometimes a secondary choice has a big unexpected consequence much later in the game. Sometimes a big choice influences little outside of the ongoing situation. Non-linearity is indeed amazing in Cyberpunk 2077.
Unfortunately for Johnny, an anti-Arasaka terrorist and rock musician, my character is an Arasaka loyalist, a corpo-rat who hates rock music. Thus, from the moment he started talking to me like the annoying hallucination he was, I got on a path of getting rid of him at any cost. Each time he opened his mouth he was reassuring me about the correctness of my course. As a typical American boomer, he condemns American foreign adventures in the name of democracy but never questions democracy itself, hates brothels yet bangs the easy fangirls, disrespects most men yet gets enraged when disrespected in return. I wouldn’t call him, or rather his digitized psyche, a posthumanist. Many supporting characters make more assertive posthumanist statements than he ever does. He desperately tries to be progressive for his era, which is the past, considering he is a resurrected consciousness from decades ago. He avoids discriminatory rhetoric which was unfashionable in his era but never abandons his cultural attachments to that era and fights yesterday’s wars. Hell, the sole gang he explicitly hates is 6th Street, fellow Yanks. He is not allowed to be cruel towards ethnic minority gangs. As such, he is a perfect commercialized persona who inherits the ancient habit of all organized religions - to get the money of money haters.
While we neutralize people who stand in our way in lethal or non-lethal ways, our entertainment options are fairly limited. We can buy cars, apartments, weapons and chrome implants, clothing, food, and drink, we can play the guitar, or enjoy the local advanced virtual reality called braindance. The lack of things to buy is mitigated by their outrageous cost. Thus, sandbox and immersion elements aren’t as impressive as non-linearity. As for implants, I started the game as a biological conservative, even refraining from futuristic cosmetic elements when creating the appearance of my character. Yet ended up filling all implant slots, becoming half-cyborg. Having the cash and not doing so would mean losing the competition to those who do have the latest chrome and firmware.
As a straight man, I obviously went after a Nomad girlboss named Panam, like an airline. She was obsessed with her macho Nomad boyfriend both before and after our intercourse in a stolen tank. She continuously berated me for how much of a non-Nomad I am, preoccupied with thoughts about her Angelic and meta-narratively perfect subculture. Her Aldecaldo bros are as flawless, good, and culturally mandated as any pro-power peaceful demonstrators can be. She disliked my Corpo Plaza apartment, which I finally bought after going through a lot of trouble, yet she wasn’t hardcore enough for a date in Dogtown, the most dangerous and criminogenic district in the city. Meredith, the wealthy girl from Militech whom I saved during one of the previous quests, appeared for one night stand only. She would be a better choice for my character, introducing an intriguing tech espionage angle between two corporations. But alas, developers weren’t willing to open up that option.
Song So Mi, the major character from the game’s only expansion “Phantom Liberty” (a hint that liberty is a culturally mandated value, sold to you by the unfree), is the sole character in the game I would actually care to romance, had she been more of a human and less of a machine. She is melancholic, egoistic, and self-obsessed - all markings of a fine alpha woman. Stuck among the powers she cannot control, she improvises along the road. Just like I do in real life. Her story gets more and more epic, as we discover that she is basically a weapon of mass destruction with thoughts and feelings. As a person with the grayest morality in the game, she is also a test subject for players to explore their views on qualities that make someone a human, a woman, a friend.
Reed, a guy who wants to control Song, is a very nervous and very assuming virtualization of Idris Elba. Arasaka hater and servant of Yank revanchists, he presented himself very seriously. Awkward, considering he did it in the middle of a lawless urban wasteland instead of real-life Langley, Virginia. Without a functioning state apparatus, he is just a merc among mercs. Yet he never stopped assuming things in advance, just like real-life secret agents do. Then again, what is FIA in this world? Militarized brahmins of Militech. Free States hate this guy and his blue-haired (in the original TV depiction) female President Myers.
Expansion’s beginning treats all lifepaths the same, yet it is a funny coincidence that my Corpo character was hired by So Mi while Reed had to deal with the consequences of that choice. Knowing all there is to know about me, he was understandably suspicious all the time and nevertheless dependent on the fact of me being thrown into this world state. Had he offered an immediate solution to the game’s main problem - the erasure of my identity by Johnny’s engram - I could have closed my eyes on all the primitive social control techniques from KGB textbooks he was constantly using. But he continued bragging about connections, making promises, and assuming too much. As a person, So Mi had nothing to offer me. Yet, fulfillment of her wishes meant NUSA would lose a huge sum of Eurodollars, which is a more concrete outcome than a promise. This is why in my playthrough So Mi went to the Moon and Reed continued his assumptions in a better world.
Corporations either submit to the states, like this game’s developer CD Projekt, or form them, like American defense contractors. Those who do the latter don’t want competition, so they encourage vegetarian subcultures like Panam’s Aldecaldos or Western Antifa. Just like Parisian haute couture designers pretend to be gay to keep the alpha males away from alpha females, by creating the impression that the high fashion scene is implicitly homosexual, established corporate execs would rather deal with an anarchist junkie than a working-class fascist. Сouturiers know that a gym bro will be a better lover for a fashion model than they are, execs know that focused fascist is a bigger threat to their place in the food chain than aimless anarchist. This is why states and corporations form their own cultures of violence and condemn the cultures of violence of their competitors simultaneously.
Because Cyberpunk 2077’s political space is so chaotic and “libertarian”, the law enforcement is private and carried out by “fixers”, wealthy middle-men who hire “edgerunners”, people who can complete the tasks set by fixers being fully aware of moral codes which exist in any specific place. This is what we do in the game’s many secondary missions. When we make a stealthy pacifist approach to a mission it means we are undecided or neutral on this particular case. Being a frank and open “Terminator” means we are actively hostile to it. Switching sides or double-crossing is a sign that we understood and accepted the position of our target. Although overshadowed by main story missions, fixer jobs are often interesting and feature the game’s many unique gangs and subcultures. Who is your pick between biologically conservative Scavengers, who think it is okay to kidnap defenseless strangers for their organs and chrome, and tech accelerationists Maelstrom, who might buy the said chrome from Scavengers but try to earn their living via old-school gang warfare? Will you give the sex work joint to the gang of feminist reformist prostitutes from Mox or opt for a proven approach with the patriarchal pro-Arasaka group named Tyger Claws?
In such an environment, the police department is also a gang, albeit a slightly more pretentious one. Declaring yourself a servant of public good means little in the absence of common agreement about what is good.
Side missions are best done before the main ones because it is difficult to explain why your character should care about mundane matters at the advanced stages of his illness. Once you are done with them, it is time to decide whether you risk trusting Arasaka with fixing their own technology which is messing with your brain. For my character this choice was clear - I was their former employer, a fan of their corporate and national cultures, and an ethnic minority within this alternate America. I would love an advanced Shogunate from coast to coast. For those who have chosen different lifepaths and are themselves American this might be different.
Thus I bowed to Hanako-sama using my corpo-only dialogue option and chose the most aggressive responses to Johnny’s objections. When I got to their orbital hospital, which is represented by the Moon card in the game’s Tarot eschatology, I got the chance to call all the romance-friendship options. My girlfriend was enraged I did not consult with her and acted bossy again, forgetting that we only banged because the game gave me no other option. She was not a person I’d like to return to. A troubled cop had no time to talk at all, even though I did all his missions in the best manner possible. Celebrity homo just wanted to watch some TV and I was distracting him. This I can understand - I refused to trash his rival’s yacht with him, as I consider such outbursts the privilege of the wealthy. A lesbian chick was kind but useless. I meta-gamed her final mission by refusing to take Tyger Claws’ money despite wanting to, as the wiki said the mission would be locked out if I did. Hanako-sama refused to answer, probably thinking she did all she could. The final choice in this ending - to become an engram like Johnny and corporation’s CEO Saburo Arasaka, with a lesser chance of getting a suitable biological body compared to Saburo, or to die within six months back on Earth, among people you don’t really care about. The only bro I could have, plot character Goro Takemura, died because Johnny confused me and because I was under-leveled during one mission, not strong enough to wander in the dark among armed special forces teams. The only girl I liked was not on Earth but somewhere close in space, having fixed her similar problem. So I chose digitalization and hope of getting resurrected in a less metallic form than hers.
Although considered a depressing ending by the majority of players, I think it actually concluded the story in the only way which gives my character hope of surviving to the second game. Where he probably won’t be a protagonist but can make some sort of cameo.
Final conclusion. Cyberpunk 2077 is a video game that tries to illustrate a wide range of mature topics. All in all, it rather succeded, despite the disorganized big picture. It presents a worse and less coherent world than the one we saw in “The Witcher” saga, perhaps because it is more difficult to deal with futuristic elements that are tied to our real universe. But the seriousness of the approach to each particular small topic is amazing. And the gameplay is exciting. 9/10.
P.S. If you liked this sample of assorted behavior, read my earlier art-related texts: on the late Soviet movie “Bespredel” about prison culture and the French Sadist melodrama “Story of O”.
"the country somehow continues to be looked upon as a beacon for radical leftist movements across the globe". As in our reality: Putin's Russian Federation is a beacon for extreme leftists and extreme rightists at the same time. Damn political horseshoe / bagel!