
"The whole story, as stories about the dead tend to be, is full of hauntings."
I've been replaying Cyberpunk 2077, for my own curiosity and because some friends working on a 2077-related project asked me to. I last played it at launch, on the PlayStation 4 build that became defunct shortly after I published my review on US Gamer*. Revisiting games after reviewing them is always a fascinating endeavor; contrary to the idea that reviews are definitive statements, games often strike differently outside of the artificial constraints of the embargoed review, after bugs have been patched and the work's ideas have had time to breathe and settle in the cultural landscape.
Reviewing Cyberpunk was uniquely charged, so far as those constraints go. The game was a technical mess on consoles--console code didn't even go out until after market release, which is almost never a good sign--and it was difficult to even see the game itself through the morass of glitches, broken scripts, and obnoxious crashes. Here's what I said** then:
It is, in a word, underwhelming: shot through with small bits of excellence, Cyberpunk 2077 is nevertheless overwhelmed by dozens of small problems that pile on top of each other, many of them clearly the result of the hostile conditions in which the game was made. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 is an exercise in relentless, small frustrations that pile up to the point of overwhelming the final product. This problem won't get you, and maybe the next one won't either, but experiencing them all is exhausting—and after a while, nearly unbearable.
My complaints, beyond the bugs, were myriad: the cell phone ruined the pacing and yelled at you about side jobs and used cars; the UI and upgrade system was a mess; gunplay and driving both felt like hot garbage; most side quests were boring, predictable, and underwritten. Some of those problems have, now, been fixed, while others are much more avoidable than they were in the original version. 2022's Cyberpunk 2077 is, fundamentally, the same game, but it's a cleaned-up version of that game, one that more easily wears its artistic intentions close to the surface, more polished mirror than scanner darkly.
Is this distilled Cyberpunk 2077 a good game? Hard to tell--in a less publicized context, teased apart from the serious issues plaguing CD Projekt Red throughout its development, it probably could have been a beloved 7/10. Is it good cyberpunk, as in science fiction? Probably not.*** But as a story of a dead person coming to terms with themselves, a story of purgatory and (possibly redemptive) suffering?
Yeah. I'd say it hits pretty well.
Picture this: you're V, a hacker mercenary idiot, and you're dead, your brain barely functional thanks to experimental technology strapped into it, with an asshole rockstar terrorist on your shoulder playing the role of an unhelpful Virgil. Everywhere you go, you're greeted with reminders of what you lost and where you're going. The club you get your jobs at is the Afterlife; you hallucinate visions of tarot cards; ghosts and disembodied AIs like angels and demons haunt your every moment; the past is everywhere.
Night City is hell, but one unharrowed. The gods all live behind the Blackwall, and they're not coming back until the end of all things. In hell, you don't have many choices. You're already gone, after all, the engram of Johnny Silverhand slowly eroding what's left of a bullet-blasted brain that's already flatlined once. You don't get to choose where, or how, to die. Your naivete and greed already decided that for you. You just get to choose what comes after, whether you're ascending or descending on the chain of being when you leave Night City behind.
Cyberpunk 2077 plays best understood like this, as what Roda-Gil calls a haunted house: a spiritual hallucination set inside a shallow technocapitalist mess. Philip K. Dick's brand of Gnosticism, that.
Around the middle of the game, you're given a sidequest involving a convicted murderer. He's found Jesus, and wants to be crucified like his Savior, while a mass media company makes an immersive virtual reality experience out of it, transmitting the precise horrific sensation of that death to everyone who wants it. This, he imagines, is worship, a chance to put people in the shoes of the true son of God, or at least a chance for him to go out with something other than killing to show for his life.
As V, you're given the opportunity to try to talk him out of it, or to help. This man resonates with you, with the naive warmth and curiosity you present that's so at odds with your career as a cyber-gun-for-hire. He wants you to be with him, in the end. He wants you to drive home the nails.
I decided to do it, even though I didn't believe he was accomplishing anything of note. I crucified him. Why not? What right did I have to tell this man how he should die?
I was already dead.
Notes
*to my knowledge, the last review US Gamer ever published. Grim milestones.
**with edits from Kat Bailey, whose work is probably the only reason this thing is readable.
***Though, to be fair, I think the record has been exaggerated on this point. While I'm supportive and laudatory of attempts to reclaim/refashion cyberpunk into something authentically revolutionary and inclusive, its origins are decidedly not that. Originary cyberpunk traffics in bitterness and juvenile hopelessness, the average man (almost always a man, specifically) crushed to death in the cogs of massive corporate machines. If nothing else, 2077 does nail that particular feeling, both in terms of its storytelling and also its oft-frustrating, mechanistically hostile world.