Finding Love in the Landfill: on Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update

Silicon Sasquatch

There was a moment in Cyberpunk 2077, probably about 20 hours into my first run through the game, where I thought I was playing a triple-A artifact that had dislodged itself in time and arrived on my doorstep years in advance.

You might gather from this feeling that I waited to play the game until it had been out for about a year and thoroughly un-fucked itself through countless patches. You’re correct, and that waiting wound up proving quite prudent. I remembered the game I played being mostly pretty good, frequently quite intelligent; occasionally it even rendered me speechless in realizing the dramatic lengths of its ambition. I would have recommended it back then, but I wasn't recommending much of anything to anyone at the time.

That was in 2021. Now it's 2023, and I've played through almost the entire game again a second time. So? Would I still recommend it?

Cyberpunk 2077 is not the game it launched as. It's been patched so many times now that it's even incremented to a second major version number, complete with an advertising campaign and plenty of incentives designed to woo skeptics and fans back into the fold. All of this was rolled out like a red carpet over a mountain of frayed and wine-stained old rugs just in time for its one expansion, Phantom Liberty, to step out of a Tesla Cybertruck and glitch its merry way down the runway.

The Cyberpunk 2077 of 2023 is basically not broken. It's still got plenty of bizarre glitches (stroke-warning-sign lighting effects, with no tangible connection to the current environment, are constantly popping off), half-measures (character progression is better, but a talent tree feels repressive for a game that's otherwise all about a plug-and-play world), and performance compromises (why do cars almost always only show up on one side of the road? At least they're constantly running me the fuck over, firmly grounding me in the authentic SoCal setting) that look weird as hell, but you're not likely to notice them if you're new to this game. So: it's not broken, but it's still an open-world, triple-A game. It’s a beautiful depiction of a disgusting world, a monumental collaborative work of pop culture that's inexorably and perpetually burning itself to the ground. But you'd have to be pretty jaded to not find joy and wonder in watching a controlled burn.

It’s mostly fun to play. Running, driving, dashing, air-dashing, dash-double-jump-air-dashing, and shooting/slicing people are your primary verbs, and they roll off the tongue. There’s a story system running under the hood that's always tossing fresh choices your way; you'll quickly realize that most of these are mere window dressing, but every now and then you'll dip your toe into an oil-contaminated puddle and discover it's disguising a seaweed-choked lake of rich narrative complexity.

Because it's an open-world game with cars and guns, there are hundreds of opportunities to do reckless shit with both of them. Most of this stuff is not fun to engage with because, at best, it's meaningless and, at worst, it props a mirror up in front of you and exposes the sheer depravity of your actions as a player. Night City is full of all kinds of characters; many are blank caricatures who bark bizarre, Rockstar-adjacent quips at nobody in particular, and a few are fully-voiced, opinionated, autonomous androids you may even grow quite attached to. But the vast majority of the non-people populating this awful city amount to mere obstacles to avoid, lest you mow somebody down in view of the police, which means you've got to spend the next couple minutes playing hide-and-seek with some truly wretched adversary AI.

But then there are the NPCs with arrows over their heads, and this is where the depraved, grinning rictus of the game's core design reveals itself. Some arrows are blue, and others are yellow. You are encouraged to kill these people because you'll get items and experience points for it. If you kill the blue ones, you get in trouble because they're the cops and, despite being at best a heartless criminal, your character has no motivation — and indeed, the game offers no real reward — for picking a fight with them.

The yellow-arrow folks, however, are fair game, and hunting season never ends. During story missions, you associate yellow-arrow NPCs as enemies to be avoided, quietly dispatched, or brutally killed in a full-on violent assault. But out in the open world, you'll see tons of people with these arrows. Some of them are committing violent crimes when you find them. But the vast majority are not; they're petty thieves, drug users, or just guys being dudes. But the longer you play any game like this, the deeper-entrenched your neural pathways for deriving rewards from a Skinner box become. Yellow arrows equate to free guns, free money, and fast XP.

And so you'll likely find yourself, at some point in your playthrough, mindlessly mowing them down, shooting them up, or hacking their brains until they literally catch fire and die in front of you. You won't even think twice about it. They're basically Super Mario coin blocks, requiring just as much mental effort and prompting just as much moral ambiguity in harvesting them. Except they're people; they have conversations with their buddies, they hang out, and — as the game takes great pains at times to reinforce — they're not uniformly "good" or "bad." Because, to its credit, this game is quite certain that nobody can be comprehensively described in binary terms.

They aren’t real, of course. None of this is. But our lives are, and our time that we spend playing games is real time that can be spent in any number of other ways. At a certain point you may look around your room or see a pet or loved one walk by and realize you're doing something supremely fucked up, and you may have a moment of reckoning.

For every sharp exchange of dialogue, wonderfully nuanced main character, and stunning viewpoint in Cyberpunk 2077 — and the game is truly overflowing with all of the above — there are at least a dozen moments of banal cruelty and mindless indulgence. Of course, the game makes it pretty obvious that its universe is all about banal cruelty and mindless indulgence, so one could broker the argument that this all amounts to intentional meta-commentary. But the longer I play, and the more boxes I check on V's virtually limitless to-do list, the more I feel the weight of the game's overstuffed void of meaningless, cruel bullshit diminishing the beauty of this painstakingly broken world. As with most big-budget open-world games, it can't quite decide upon the full range of choices it ought to present to the player, and it leans a bit too much on whatever's cheap and easy to scale. Gotta market these games somehow, I know, but I can't ignore how much all this junk food is spoiling what's otherwise an immaculate seven-course meal.

The opposite of love really isn't hate; it's apathy. Now look at how long this review is.

I love Cyberpunk, which is why I'm so down on it a lot of the time. I love it both in spite of, and maybe even because of, the things I find disappointing, awful, and distressing about it. I recommend it because I think sometimes it's good to let yourself feel like shit and to give yourself the opportunity to stop and ask yourself why that is. I think these uncomfortable, squished-in moments are where we learn and where we make decisions for ourselves. And any game that simultaneously inspires me with the heart-swelling richness of collaborative human artistic achievement while force-feeding me depraved and unlovable garbage is, if nothing else, the makings of an utterly fascinating experience.