Cyberpunk 2077 broke my heart
An unplanned trip to Night City took me for a ride that I didn't want to get off
RPGs are probably my favorite genre of video game. Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate 3… and now, I’m going to have to put Cyberpunk 2077 (2021) on that list as one of the all-time best video game experiences I’ve had. The funny thing about it is that if an RPG isn’t working for me, I bounce off it hard. My first was Final Fantasy XIII. At the time I didn’t understand JRPGs and I still don’t think they’re quite the experience I want from an RPG, but because of those memories of hours spent on the PS1 trying to piece together the puzzle of two disparate groups coming from two different walks of life, FF8 will remain the one that’s close my heart even if others get better ratings and reviews.
Playing an MMO, any MMO, but especially a game like EVE Online which is heavily dependent on player-driven emergent gameplay can suck up a lot of free time. It doesn’t leave a lot of opportunities to play other games. I found myself squeezing in rounds of Fortnite or Helldivers 2, but sinking my teeth into something as massive as a RPG? Unthinkable. There’d be a notification that there’s some action to be had in EVE Online right as the story’s picking up and I’d have to either save (assuming you can in that particular moment), quit game, fire up the EVE launcher, jump into comms, and then hope beyond hope that they haven’t left without me. Chances are good that by the time I’ve done all that the opportunity is gone or we took too long to form a fleet and the action passed by with a wave and a smile.
I’ve been feeling stuck in EVE Online for a while now. I left ideal my corporation (read: analog to guilds in World of Warcraft) because of interpersonal strife and a feeling like I was stressed all the time and unable to actually enjoy playing the game. Now I’m part of a big-ass group with hundreds, perhaps even thousands of players that count themselves members. The playstyle is different and suddenly I’m no longer an apex predator at the top of my game, but a small fish in the ocean. There’s precious few times where I get to just chill with people I like talking to and when the big space battles happen I’m usually not able to hang my people while doing it… We’re bullets coming out of an machine gun. On top of that I reached my breaking point with the amount of friction I was experiencing at EVE University and decided I would no longer teach or do anything. I’m wrapping up commitments I made and bugging out. This is supposed to be a game after all, so why does it feel like I’m rarely having any goddamn fun?
I decided that I would take a little break. I let my people know and finished Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. A beautiful game that really shows off Ninja Theory’s ability to craft visually stunning worlds and expert utilization of motion capture. It was better than the first game, but not distinct enough to really justify it’s existence. In fact, it was so good that I wish it had been the first and only game to chronicle Senua’s journey of grief, doubt, self-hatred, and trauma. Once I had finished that, I decided to look through my library and games and pick something play… It’s funny, I’m a deal-snatcher who buys games when they’re on sale or part of a bundle because that’s usually the only way I can afford them. This has resulted in me acquiring a lot of games that I haven’t played. For some reason, I saw Cyberpunk 2077 on the store front page and thought, “y’know, Cado and Patrick said on Remap Radio that it was really good now and the Phantom Liberty DLC was incredible.” I don’t think it was on sale, but I had a few points saved up on Epic Games store which made it feel like I was getting it on sale.
I didn’t have much in the way of expectations going into it except that my favorite podcast personalities thought it was good so there’s a chance I might enjoy it too. What I got was something that hooked me in a way that games so rarely do. The last game to hook me like this was Baldur’s Gate 3. In this capitalist hellscape where every day can feel like a struggle to get up and go to work knowing that your wasting the best years of your life for some company that doesn’t a shit about you, it’s nice to be able to escape into another world where you can actually change things. RPGs let you play as a character who is hypercompetent, as the NPCs are frequently reminding you when you do even the most basic things. For you, it is basic, but for them that would be achievement. As a sidenote: one of the most immersion breaking things about RuneScape, the old MMO which is now exists as a legacy product called Old School RuneScape was in the tutorial when the priest who shows you how to use prayer spells tells you that he’s not seen anyone like you in a long time… and yet there’s 10-20 other player characters standing around getting the same message. Games are silly like that sometimes.
I played as a corporate go-getter. The prologue sets up that I’ve been tasked with the job of killing my boss’s boss in a powerplay to get ahead. I’m all about killing bosses, that’s what video games are for, right? Turns out that the plot was discovered, I’m terminated from the big megacorporation and the majority of my assets are seized. Lucky for me, my ol’ pal Jackie is there to help me start again as an edgerunner; a mercenary who uses some combination of cybernetic implants, weapons, charm, and a lot of good luck to eke out a living on the fringes of society. Then we get a get job that’s not like others: it’s big, it’s risky, and it could set Jackie and I up for life if we can pull it off. Turns out this gig does not go according to plan. Surprise, surprise. Shit goes haywire, important plot developments happen, and oh yeah—Jackie catches some lead on the escape and bleeds out. I was worried this game was going to disappoint me because this moment didn’t work on me. I wasn’t sad the way the music was telling me I should be.
But maybe I wasn’t supposed to be sad yet? I’m not really sure. Most games that have a major NPC die put all the emphasis on the moment it happens (think Virmire in Mass Effect 1). Instead, what I found most impactful was how much grieving was a part of the story, both in the main plotline and in subplots. Every character that knew Jackie has their own feelings and expresses those feelings at various moments throughout the narrative. I went on a mission that turned out to be something of a culturally-specific wake for Jackie called an ofrenda. I got to meet Jackie’s mom, Mamá Welles, and his friends. They all shared stories of Jackie and what he meant to them. It brought me to tears and caught me off-guard with how effective that moment was. I told Mamá Welles not to be such a judgmental asshole to Jackie’s girlfriend. In the end, I was gifted Jackie’s motorcycle and indeed, that was my favorite ride in this game.
For as much as I love RPGs, I hate driving in them. Mass Effect was infamous for it’s abysmal driving experience in the Mako, but I tolerated it because the rest of the game was amazing and driving was a small fraction of the game. Other games, like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas make driving a central part of the game and I hated it to the point where I stopped playing. Even Red Dead Redemption features a lot of driving, except the cars are horses. Mercifully, Red Dead will let you pick a destination and essential auto-pilot your way there. Imagine my surprise that Cyberpunk 2077 not only kept me hooked, but I really enjoyed cruising around on that motorcycle. One moment in particular hit me especially hard when I was going from one place to another in the middle of a big story mission and I’m cruising down the freeway at 150… mph? km/h? Not sure, but it was the fastest that beast of a machine could take me. It was at that moment a song came on called “With Her” by Steven Richard Davis and Ego Affliction.
It’s easy to overlook music in video games. Video games are already often written off as a frivolous past time that boys play when they’re teenagers and then grow out of when they become adults with responsibilities. The reality is that all kinds of people play video games; boys and young men are just the stereotype. Music in video games has secretly been such a crucial part of a video game’s identity. Ask anyone what music they think of when you say, “Mario” and they’ll undoubtedly conjure up the tune from World 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers and it’s sequels (and in fact it is now just referred to as the Mario theme). A smaller, yet no less enthusiastic number of the population can recall without missing a beat what the melody of “One-Winged Angel” from Final Fantasy VII sounds like. Hell, half of the sentimental and sappy videos on TikTok feature the song “Memory” from Undertale.
Video game music, like soundtracks for movies, have always been important to making incredible moments in video games feel as significant as the designers want. In that moment, Cyberpunk 2077 had me feeling like an absolute badass. The song and the moment I associate with it got me so hard that I would frequently listen to the radio in-game just to catch the song again. Think about that: I could have just as easily gone to YouTube and looked up the song or pulled it up on Tidal (because fuck Spotify) and played it on repeat, but the game had me so immersed that I was reliving the 80s and 90s experience of listening for hours just to hear your song come on (fortunately the DJs in-game don’t talk over the beginning and ending, but you can’t record it onto your trusty cassette tape).
The game has a variety of endings, but there are two main paths thanks to the Phantom Liberty DLC. The first is a daring infiltration of a megacorporation. The second is a CIA-like black op regime change as a smokescreen for one of the biggest heists one can imagine. The specifics of these two endings change based on choices you make. I played both endings. In the first, I chose to give a middle finger to the corporate heiress and instead asked an old friend for help. When it came time to decide what would be done with Johnny’s engram, I uploaded Johnny to the cloud and sent my character back to the real-world. To my surprise, I wake up in a big fancy apartment that rivals some of the nicest mansion set pieces the game has to show off. Things seem to be working out, but I’m still dying and I’ve got one big job coming up that’s a one-in-a-million chance to save my life. My chosen paramour, Judy, says she’s leaving Night City and… Holy shit did that hit me hard. You can protest, beg her to stay, but I opted to be the kind of girlfriend who says, “go live your best life even if it isn’t with me.” That shit wrecked me emotionally. Despite defying the odds, despite all the sacrifices made to get there I couldn’t keep everything I had worked so hard for. It ends with a space walk and ambiguity about whether my character actually manages to find the cure. That’s a reality from real life that rarely shows up in video games and yet it worked for me. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
For the second ending, I chose to side with Songbird up until it was revealed that she had lied about having a cure for my plot-specific disease. I get flown to hospital and they manage to remove the plot-specific disease with some of the best doctors in the country. I wake up and it turns out that in the process of curing said plot-specific disease, I lost the ability to use implants. I could use some of the most basic ones, but all the fancy combat implants that made me such a badass throughout the game had to be removed or they would have killed me. It also turns out that I had been in a coma for two years. My paramour, Judy, had been expecting me to be back within a month but when I didn’t come back she moved on with her life. She moved to Pittsburg, got married, and has a good life. Panam, the friend I made and spent a significant portion of the mid-game helping out, wouldn’t pick up. It’s revealed in an end-credits call that Panam was devastated by my absence and my call threatened to send her back to a very bad place emotionally. The ripperdoc, a type of doctor who specializes in implants—who gave me my first implant of the game, assured me that the hospital doctors must have missed something and that I should come back to Night City as soon as possible so he can get me sorted.
As it turns out, humpty-dumpty could not be put back together again. I would no longer be able to live the life of an edgerunner. To drive the point home, on the way out from seeing the ripperdoc, two random-ass dudes beat the shit out of me for what few credits I had. That’s when Misty, Jackie’s girlfriend, shows up and encourages my character to let go of the past and embrace a new life: learn how to live as normie. It was not what I was expecting. My character ended her legendary career and became an anonymous face in the crowd. Fuck me up, that shit broke my damn heart in a good way.
Cyberpunk, and all the “-punk” subgenres, have always had their roots in critiques of various flavors of capitalism and the many ways that capitalism turns people into labor or products (sometimes both). Cyberpunk 2077 was no exception. Even this legendary edgerunner who had done the impossible twice and lived was chewed up and spit back out. I don’t know if there is a happy ending in the game, but despite the endings I got being bleak I am so fucking enamored with this game. There’s a lot of nightmare fuel in this game so I’m not sure if I’ll replay it the way I return to Mass Effect from time to time, but goddamn… This game gave me everything I wanted except a happy ending and I love CD Projekt RED for being brave enough to do that to me.