CYBERPUNK… IS HERE. We are now living in the Cyberpunk present after years of yearning for the Cyberpunk future. Videogames will be the primary marker we measure time by, a way of showing future historians “Before Cyberpunk” and “After Cyberpunk.”
I’m just kidding – that’s a joke. Videogames have, thus far, avoided having, being or approximating any particularly serious watershed moments.
There was no signal, after all, no flagpole in the ground marking the occasion when studio after studio was found to be abusing employees in 2020. It didn’t happen for Ubisoft. certainly didn’t happen for Naughty Dog. It especially didn’t happen for CDProjekt Red. Folks wrote articles about it, sure – but most websites made certain they still reviewed the games made in conditions that gave their staff PTSD or anxiety without so much as batting an eyelash.
In the KOTAKU DOT COM review of Cyberpunk 2077, there is a single line referencing the history of this game’s development:
Readers may assume, maybe, that this game has appeared as if out of thin air. Cyberpunk 2077’s story begins a long time ago. In 2013, CDProjekt Red released the very first trailer. In a time that seems like it might as well be prefixed by “a long long time ago,” we got our first glimpse.
Shearing metal across a beautiful woman’s face. She’s actually hideous, you see, because she’s got two giant razors sticking out of her arms – freak technology. A lone cop points a gun at her head. It’s as if the trailer is asking us: “Will you be the freak lady? Or are you the cool cop?” In this trailer, Cyberpunk 2077 made its first down payment on videogame enthusiasts’ goodwill: no matter what, you could have sweet arm razors either way.
A few dozen trailers later, a dozen corporate sign-offs and oft-parodied yellow Twitter statements later, and here we are:
DEEP-HELL Presents: Cyberpunk 2077: The No Escape From Videogames Review
In that first trailer, we were promised one thing, and that leads us to the first category of our meticulous review score tally for Cyberpunk 2077:
CAN YOU HAVE ARM BLADES: 100/100
Really, this is what we all wanted right? The freedom, the absolute decadent excess, of having giant razor blades pop out of our arms whenever we want? That first trailer did promise, after all, and god damnit did CDProjekt Red deliver. A smart friend of mine once said, “A guy who can do something” is the plot of a videogame and “A guy who has something happen to him” is the plot for a film. God damnit if CDPR didn’t lean into that former note as hard as it possibly fucking could.
We cried for videogames and they said: here, this is videogames. That’s not the whole story, though. It took a few long years for us to this point — so many years that the hype may now be irreconcilable with what it’s like to actually play it.
We’re long past the era of vaporware. Look at the way a game might still be relevant in a particular news cycle years after the last time we’d seen any real news from it. Whole sequels to critically-acclaimed videogames have been teased for years, with each new article about them sounding even more desperate for attention. Eventually, those games — and those articles — would become memes in their own right. Now even when a game fails to even show up it can become an entertainment product of a different sort.
How did we get here? Can the so-called “most important videogame of our decade” really be boiled down to punching or shooting or slicing with arm razors? At least they’re better than Katanas. No more Katanas. A Katana isn’t cool. Put a sword in your fucking body, cybercreep.
We got here because CDProjekt Red wanted us to be here the whole time. I agree with auteur theory, but maybe this is one of those times where a shadowy cabal of corporate overlords did want us to think a certain way before we even started playing. All videogame marketing is driven at least in part by social media now. The best way to get social media to work for you is to make sure that someone is always super pissed off at something.
John Berger tells a brief anecdote at the beginning of his book, Landscapes. He talks about a painting of a couple on the land they owned, and argues that its creation was not merely to capture the people on the land itself; it also represented that they were free to chase anyone they wanted off their land. The portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews shows us the world as they wanted to be viewed in it.
The first videogame by this company that I ever played had been given to me for free, because I asked. Everyone who writes about videogames should ask for free shit, because no matter how critical or scathing we are we’re all still working in the PR wing. For broke writers, amateurs, people striking out on their own: companies tend to want to make sure they have more goodwill, rather than less.
CDProjekt Red’s primary motivation for Cyberpunk 2077 was that it was made to be talked about. All of our billions of dollars of technology has conspired to put us in this state. Videogames are either meant to be played forever, or meant to be talked about forever.
Well, here we are. We should probably start actually talking about things forever. We can’t let them disappear over the horizon every hype cycle. Reviewing Cyberpunk 2077 now is tantamount to critiquing an artist who hasn’t even finished priming the canvas. In six, ten, twelve months – this game could look and feel entirely different. That’s why — fuck it — we should be irritating and keep bringing up the bullshit the employees at CDProjekt Red had to go through just to launch their early-access-ass videogame.
From the very first news stories about Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR wanted to leverage all of that goodwill people felt towards it as a corporation. Waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 was defined by constant updates on delays and controversies. Every apology administered was backhanded and tongue-in-cheek. How could our favorite, adorable little Polish underdog company do these terrible things people were accusing them of?
The real humor is that CDProjekt is no longer really a “little Polish underdog.” They had a thousand employees in 2019, not including subsidiaries and all of the companies they probably employ to handle staffing and payroll, etc. Here, in this game distributed internationally by a company with a newly-minted billionaire CEO, players can struggle against corporations owning individuals.
Enter Night City. Here the city can represent something only its maker wants to recognize. Our product can set you free from crass commercialism. Here’s our painting of a city, and we want you to know that real companies are not giant meat grinders dedicated solely to products.
Cyberpunk 2077’s overarching plot is about struggling against corporations that have monetized and commercialized every aspect of life. Gender. Sexuality. Ability and disability. Fuck, there are vending machines in every bedroom. The Bodega finally won. Was there a rational disconnect when whatever director gave the first “you’re going to be working one hundred hours this week” speech when the game first delayed? I doubt development ever matched the tone the plot was going for.
One controversy among many to be sure. Now we’re split between “fuck videogame developers they need to just RELEASE MY GOD DAMNED GAME” fans and “It is so bad they suffered through that. I hope I can play it soon still!” fans. Two barely distinguishable sides of the same cheap coin.
Mike Pondsmith has remarked that Cyberpunk stuff just looks cool. As an aesthetic, for various cultural reasons: it is the coolest. Where Mike’s really coming from in his statements is that it’s also an aesthetic most clearly matching our own.
The very earliest Cyberpunk 2077 trailer that came out featured a beautiful woman juxtaposed against her horrifying mechanical augmentations.
Wired quotes Mike Pondsmith as laying out a crucial detail in the original tabletop game, that players needed to have common struggles to unite them. Cyberpunk 2020 wasn’t about saving the world, it was about making sure the government didn’t buy your apartment block and you could still pay rent. Everybody has to pay rent — increasingly more often, rent they can’t even afford without multiple jobs. Who wouldn’t, given the chance, deck themselves out in invulnerable cyberwear and take to the streets to get something back?
Cyberpunk 2077 is instead a game about something nobody can relate to. A heist gone wrong. Having a literal ghost in your head. Meeting every colorful character in a city long gone, everyone connected. The zero-point of the story launches us right into the plot through a montage set to colorful music.
We are not part of Night City as inhabitants, merely as players. Our rent is already paid.
Every time a new article or YouTube video or famous person makes a statement to the effect of “videogames are for tiny small brained children,” there’s a rush to offer alternatives, to counter. “Videogames allow people to experience stories like never before! In a way, it is true: videogames do let us experience new stories, just never, it seems, from our own perspective. Every story in Cyberpunk 2077 is about people with more interesting circumstances than the protagonist.
For each Cyberpsycho I gun down and every side mission filled with little morsels of story, there’s another plot point delivered by someone else sitting in a car. On the margins of Night City there are hosts of interesting stories: Netrunners trapped in purgatory, desperate back-alley doctors carving up young starlets to escape their own debts. There’s sometimes so much extra storytelling in Cyberpunk 2077 that I often wonder if the developers never got around to really nailing the actual plot.
CYBERPUNK 2077: CAN YOU PAY YOUR RENT?: 0/100 (IN FACT I NEVER SAW MY APARTMENT AFTER I LEFT IT!)
(TOTAL SCORE SO FAR: 0/100)
Someone once said of Superhero Comics that nothing in them ever happened to real people. While I hate to weigh all the crimes of the genre against one developer, every fucking thing that happens in Cyberpunk is either miserable or fantastic with no small moments in between — and none of it ever happens to real people.
V kicks down the door to another brothel/restaurant/bar/shantytown. V kills another group of Militech/Mercenaries/Runners. V finds out They Have Harvested The Organs And Children of (follow the pattern and insert a group here). Someone calls and something obviously bad has happened. Get in the car and drive ten minutes in any direction to find out what.
Every NPC’s story is punctuated by grief and loss. Often, it would be easy to dismiss the way Cyberpunk 2077 treats its women as crass and misogynistic, another woman who is miserable and telling you her life story and needing a V of either gender (let’s be real: Cyberpunk 2077’s gender selections just offer a new binary) to do something about it. It would be easy but this is the pattern of storytelling the game wallows in for everyone and not just women.
The throughline of the he-man women haters’ club still runs through in the number of women we only truly get to know after they have died, either when their voice tearfully describes their own horror story to us through a computer terminal or someone else has to. Cyberpunk often harkens back to noir with its stories of femme fatales gone wrong, yet it seems now like a type of storytelling circling a drain. Writers perhaps unable to conjure up any new imagery instead just pull up TVropes.com. All things are bled of meaning.
Why? Why are all videogame stories like this now? Massive, two-hundred-hour affairs largely filled with stopgap missions meant to be forgotten or skipped. Get them all and you get a trophy and make the gamerscore go up.
Cyberpunk 2077’s development was rife with staff abuse and crunch. You don’t have to take my word for it: here’s Polygon with an entire article about it. Here’s In The Know describing a reddit thread with a statement from former CDProjekt staff. Finally, here’s VGR with an article about how Cyberpunk 2077 had to be partially, if not fully, rebooted during development.
Five minutes on Google sent me down a spiral of information about CDProjekt’s development woes. Every single one of them has me asking: are we going to be happy with this? Another installment of rote open world action games where the main mechanic is picking up the same gun a hundred times until the stats are good enough for the end of the game? Massive blockbuster games with stories that are largely filled with content the player is meant to immediately forget?
Someone in charge of the project couldn’t figure out a way to get it off the ground. Thousands of employee crunch hours, bonuses for staying at work during the holidays and a shot of money from investors later – after, fuck, how long have we been talking about this game? To release a videogame that can be described as “digital refuse” and “nothing we haven’t seen before.”
All of that wasn’t worth the few moments that Cyberpunk 2077 works. When a mission goes off the rails in an exciting way. When a trip across the city is filled with a real moment of tension. The gnawing thought at the back of my head, the player’s head: this can’t matter, because everybody who buys a copy of the game needs to see everything.
MOST OF THE GAME: SPARSELY WORTH IT. WISH IT WAS SHORTER. PAY YOUR FUCKING EMPLOYEES (30/100)
But Cyberpunk 2077 is really a game about two completely different cities, united in how strange and alien they can sometimes be. The City is a bad place to live, but I can walk down the street through crowds of teeming NPCs. Back alleyways are choked with looters and often in its most organic phases, you’ll stumble upon an assault or debt collection being carried out.
Time to pull your gun. Ice these fools, as Johnny Silverhand would say. There’s not a mission where you don’t kill somebody and that’s the way it is. That is not a marker of contempt – Cyberpunk 2020 was a fast paced shootout of tabletop game design. It had one of the best names for combat mechanics someone has ever maybe written: Friday Night Firefight.
Every corner of Night City is Friday Night Firefight. In a second a situation can turn sour and end with you ducking behind a car, ducking and returning fire. More often these situations will happen accidentally and combat will turn into a sloppy experience of chugging health packs and wandering to and from cover. Cyberpunk 2077 never knows if it wants to be an immersive sim or an action game and every setpiece suffers as a result.
Deus Ex is getting talked about a lot right now, and something I seldom see people bring up is that Deus Ex was a game with coherent level design. Alleyways and loading docks had a touch of the personal. Spaces were designed so you could read them: was this an entrance or an exit? Is this a path to sneak through or level geometry designed to put me in a dead end with no way out?
Cyberpunk 2077 is like “here’s a fuckin… I don’t know. For some reason there’s a car in this alleyway. Badguys are just going to show up from everywhere.”
You’ll be picking up the same gun ten or twelve times unless you just learn to how to craft your own. Whatever you’re using, it feels more like stumbling into a group of people playing Friday Night Firefight in a game of Cyberpunk 2020. An hour on normal difficulty spent dicking around means everyone for the next ten hours in the main story is going to die in a single hit from a knife.
Rather than adapting the idea of a particular Friday Night ending in a particular Firefight, Cyberpunk 2077 is every first person action game that a developer like fuckin, Ubisoft or some shit, has released. You can have arm blades, but you feel like a camera mounted on a torso attached to two nonspecific functioning entities. Sometimes nostalgia isn’t good, especially when that nostalgia is for combat in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
THERE ARE A LOT OF THE SAME WAYS TO KILL SOMEONE (10/100)
Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t getting out of this review cycle that easy, oh no. I’ve told people who approach me on the street what I think of it. They say “Deep Hell, should I play the Cyberpunk Videogame?” I wanted this to be the shortest possible way of giving those people an answer.
That question is posed wrong. Should you play Cyberpunk 2077? Sincerely: Deep-Hell Dot Com will not think you are a monster of a person for playing a videogame. Collectively, the human race should probably sit down and just try and play every videogame. Even in the Kotaku review, however, the real question getting asked is – is it worth playing the game?
Will the time you’ve invested be worth it? The slippery cars, the dozens of identical missions. Running into random alleyways and blowing everyone to bits because you’re untouchable. Awful transphobic advertising, employee crunch. A cyberpunk world that’s not about paying rent or scraping by on the streets, but about living legends and total corporate control of the world? Is any of that stuff worth it?
I don’t think so.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the television version of the videogame Cyberpunk 2077, edited for runtime. That videogame probably doesn’t actually exist anywhere but our heads. Even now, we’re still talking about that game as if it’s anything other than an object of our fantasy. Maybe the worst crime is that this game just laid the groundwork for this to happen again in the future: we are already ready and waiting for another extended hype cycle for another empty piece of software promising videogamers total freedom without any guarantee of delivery.
FINAL CATEGORY BREAKDOWN:
CAN YOU HAVE ARM BLADES: (+100)
CAN YOU PAY YOUR RENT?: (-100)
MOST OF THE GAME ONLY BARELY JUSTIFIES ITSELF: (+30)
THERE ARE A LOT OF THE SAME WAYS TO KILL SOMEONE: (+10)
IT TOOK TWELVE YEARS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO ESSENTIALLY MAKE WATCH DOGS 4: (-40)
TECHNICALLY A VIDEOGAME: (+1)
FINAL SCORE: 1/100
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