It’s an experience, and I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been religiously playing games since I was old enough to hold a controller and reach all the buttons. Before I could go through the whole alphabet, I could go through every level of Super Mario World. So when I say that Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best games ever made and easily the most immersive, even at its bug-ridden launch, it’s not without some amount of weight. And I’ve already sunk in roughly ~20 hours since the game first came online at 7:00 PM EST on December 9th, with each hour building to some crescendo I keep expecting to come. And I know I haven’t hit the high water mark yet. I’m fully prepared to be blown away, perhaps literally.
Your introduction to the world of Cyberpunk 2077 is through the eyes of V, a rough-and-tumble mercenary who’s lately returned to their netrunning alma mater and the game’s main setpiece: Night City. And what a city it is. An elegantly mad gestalt of genre tropes that are so seamlessly blended and remolded that you barely notice them at all. Part Blade Runner, part Neuromancer and part Snow Crash–each titans that spawned a genre–this simultaneously glittering and grungy metropolis is host to a delightful hodgepodge of cultures, aesthetics and social classes. And all of this is backlit by neon and holograms, permeated with the sort of debauched and euphoric techno-misery that only cyberpunk can conjure.
Navigating my way through Night City, dropping in on gangsters souped up with cybernetic implants, hacking soda machines for fun and profit, driving around in my robotically bulky yet sleek car, I can confidently say that this is the first time in all my years of gaming I’ve been able to say that I really feel like I’m in the game. CDProjekt Red have succeeded in crafting their masterwork of a complete gaming experience. You don’t question for an instant what you see relative to the setting. The combat is fluid and has weight to the point that even using the standard weaponry is a total joy. If you remember seeing something in a movie, you can probably do just that thing. Almost every part of the environment is traversable and makes for a multitude of approaches to any objective or self-assigned task, not least of which are the many open world missions that dot the map and bring the city alive in their own right.
And this is to say nothing of the story. One might be tempted to deride it as cliche, an overdone and tired homage to greater works that falls flat. But this is not so and for the very reason that the homage is carried off so well. Like many cyberpunk stories, and even cyberpunk adjacent games like Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2077 centers around a heist, the details of which I won’t reveal and mostly because I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ve been too busy, you see, gallivanting around and cutting clean through Night City’s seedy underbelly with my katana. But what I’ve seen so far is nothing short of thrilling, if not for the simple fact that I don’t have to distort it to fit my idea of playing through a Blade Runner or Neuromancer. Rather it is a perfect reproduction of what that experience would look like. Each character I meet is meticulously crafted to set the scene, to enliven and broaden, and yet so familiar that I feel right at home in the backseat of a fixer’s limo. I have to do no work, and what a gargantuan relief it is.
Cyberpunk 2077 succeeds everywhere that Deus Ex: Humankind Divided fell short, and precisely because CDProjekt Red didn’t take the easy route. You aren’t a cop, a corporate operative or special agent for some kind of cyborg control unit. Those are villains of a different kind, no different from the pushers and fixers. You’re just lowlife scum like the rest of the downtrodden masses that populate Night City. Only you just so happened to have survived long enough to make a name for yourself and trick out your body with cybernetics. Indeed, you only exist above the rest because you were just more brutal and resourceful than the rest. As such, merc-for-hire V doesn’t exist outside the system or its effects on the world around them: You’re an intrinsic part of it, spat out from its ugly chrome womb and molded into a killer. The luxury of looking down and looking in on this twisted reality, brought about by corporate oligarchy and runaway technological advances, does not belong to you. Those in power are as distant to you as the heights of the towers you look at from the sidewalk. Like the police chief in the original Blade Runner says, “If you’re not cop, you’re little people.”
And in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, little people only have one way out from under the boot: cutting through or stealing from enough people to buy a chance at freedom. We’re just lucky it’s so damn fun.