By Sam Reader
The world in Cyberpunk 2077 is screwed and there is very little you can do about it. The game, and by extension the genre of cyberpunk, is about what you can do next.
Early in the game, there’s a scene in the high-class sex club Clouds where a “doll,” a sex worker with a personality matrix downloaded into their implants that allows them to be anyone to anyone. While similar to the game’s numerous sexual encounters (all from a disorienting first-person view—the game’s interface is designed to feel like the in-universe “braindances,” movies that give you a first-person seat in the head of whoever’s recording), this particular encounter is different. Almost immediately, the session becomes emotional and vulnerable.
The doll (named either Skye or Angel), using personal information downloaded from your implants (this is, after all, a dystopia), immediately brings up the fact that the protagonist V is surrounded by death. V, a mercenary and career criminal so tough she can’t even speak in complete sentences, immediately breaks down. The stress becomes understandable considering V’s recently been told a biomechanical tumor is erasing every trace of her from her own body. The encounter continues, with V being forced to confront her dwindling existence. For now, she is alive and with choices to make. While she is doomed by the bad luck of getting a rogue AI stuck in her head, she still can make a meaningful decision: one that will poke cosmic horror-level corporations in the eye. And a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare that changes people more than people can ever change it, this is no small fork in the road.
While the encounter is relatively short—a few minutes of play time at most in a larger quest chain—it encapsulates the central theme of Cyberpunk 2077 and most cyberpunk fiction in general: When a person is trapped in a situation of all-encompassing dread, when all they can do is make the best choices in an ultimately doomed situation, how do they choose to live? And more importantly, why would they choose those things?
There’s a significant human element that’s often overlooked when discussing cyberpunk. This is reflected in the way most people discuss the genre—it’s often maligned for its less didactic approach to its depictions of dystopia, with its critics typically complaining that it does very little with “actual punk ideals” and instead operates on a system of aesthetics. Books held favorably in comparison are often about Resisting Bad Systems or Toppling Governments or any number of Big Ideas, reducing the punk to merely the idea of standing up to authority. It’s a thought-terminating cliché—if you’re forced to focus on the Big Ideas, the individual acts of staying alive and examining the ways in which you casually break systems to remain alive look paltry by comparison. “Punk,” since its inception, has always been on some level a scream of that very concept— “I am alive, I am here, you cannot kill me no matter how hard you try,” but the concept has been de-emphasized next to the larger themes of anti-authoritarianism as to look quaint and anodyne by comparison.
The best dystopian fiction, and the best cyberpunk fiction by extension, trades on this human element. Rather than chain itself to paltry political metaphors, these genres examine how people choose to confront a horrifying and inescapable situation. Cyberpunk is the exploration of human life and its value in a twisted world of high technology and low ethics. While there are authors who buck this trend, the “classical canon” of cyberpunk, the books that actually resonate, are about people struggling to live and making bad choices in a world that encourages making bad choices. The obvious influences to 2077 even bear this out. Rather than Gibson’s disaffected ambient meditations and use of cyberspace, the game opts for a more lurid tone. It’s more consistent with the casual violence in When Gravity Fails and the bizarre existential theatrics of Dr. Adder. There’s also the theme of “people trying to survive when every choice is a bad one” of Mike Pondsmith’s stated inspiration for the world of Cyberpunk, Hard Wired.
If we look at Cyberpunk 2077 on a historical level through those works, cyberpunk from its inception has always been about people caught in the cogs of a greater machine forced to make the best of bad situations, asking the reader: what ideological and technological pitfalls led to a life fraught with this much misery where even more miserable decisions must be made? There’s a lot of talk about “dichotomy” when discussing cyberpunk, especially in the idea of real versus cyberspace, technology versus humanity, but the genre’s only ever been about human life: its value, its place in the greater framework, and its sacrifice for improvement. The question has only been, has always been: what value does this ruinous world of casual violence, unchecked and often forced cybernetic modification, and numerous ways to sacrifice oneself place on a single autonomous human existence?”
Cyberpunk 2077 embodies this: From the opening smash to credits via point-blank gunshot to the head, it gives the player a simple directive: stay alive. Everything V does—from unraveling the conspiracy, to kidnapping, to vigilante work via police scanner—centers around this specific goal. The game constantly asks you the most important questions in the genre, from the moment you wake up in a garbage dump to the final agonizing seconds of the finale: How do you choose to live? What caused this horror to happen to you? What will you do in a situation where you’re being crushed in the cogs of a greater machine, and what will you do to others who are similarly being crushed?
V won’t fix the world. At best, she’ll make things marginally better for those who survive and those who come after her. V levels up her equipment, abilities, and cybernetics as she gains power, but at the end of the game, she will still be forced to reckon with her own mortality no matter how much power and wealth she attains. Those she leaves behind will feel the weight of her decisions in their lives. The ending reinforces this, with Night City swapping one corporate master for another, the player forced to play out an epilogue based on the choices they made in the main story, and a series of voicemail messages from every character who survived the events of the game saying their last thoughts to V as the credits roll. The best endings take this one step further, with the most unambiguously “happy” ones seeing V accepting her mortality but choosing to live her own way and go out on her terms. Conversely, the more depressing endings feature V taking her own life, or extending it via deals with the setting’s metaphorical devils (the US government and Arasaka), both selfish choices that devalue her worth and humanity but manage to preserve her life without it. Individual quests like “The Beast in Me” and its discussion of grief and the futility of revenge through a trans protagonist, or “Losing My Religion,” where a forcibly cyberneticized monk asks you to rescue his brother from a similar fate. While neither is tearing down any power structures, the act of helping others makes the world an appreciably better place.
The counterpoint to these ideas is represented by the actual devil on V’s shoulder throughout the game, the digital ghost of one Johnny Silverhand. Portrayed as a swaggering, snarling, take-no-prisoners sociopath by Keanu Reeves, Johnny is vocally about constant and aggressive dissent. His rants on society and corporations tend to embody the brazenly anti-capitalist sentiments many cyberpunk readers want from the genre. Johnny exists solely to topple regimes and look as cool as possible while doing it. He’s also a self-serving narcissist who views everyone around him as disposable and complains any time you deviate from his stated mission of murderous revenge against the Arasaka Megacorporation. After his torture, dismemberment, and transformation into an AI at the hands of Arasaka, only three people in the entire world mourn for him.
Johnny is all about “actual punk” and “#dissent,” but without the humanity the game consistently forces the player to grapple with. He’s just another hollow, angry person. Throughout the game, he can even realize this about himself, that for all his bravado and strikes against the corporate hegemony (one of which included nuking a corporate headquarters), his own self-serving demeanor and lack of humanity destroyed him and most of those around him. His most lasting act—the demolition of Arasaka Tower—was more about his own closure and guilt over destroying one of his very few true emotional bonds than it was about, as NPR’s Jason Sheehan put it in his incredibly confused negative review, “burn(ing) corpo shit.”
In most modern dystopian stories, Johnny would be The Deliverer, the angry person with a buried heart who takes the fight directly to the hegemony and burns them down. He’s the archetypical dystopian protagonist, someone charismatic enough to lead a movement and individualistic enough to make him seem special. A messianic figure the audience can imprint upon so they can believe that they are special and since their ideologies align with Johnny’s, they are on the side of resistance. That misdirection, Johnny as “dystopian good guy,” even drew in reviewers. Per Sheehan: “Johnny Silverhand is a full-on terrorist, but he’s the good guy, because, you know…Burn Corpo Shit.” It’s a pacification, one that leaves one’s ideas and morals unexamined (for the worst of this, one needs only look at movies like Ready Player One), but with just enough of a cheap hit of optimism and hope to make the reader feel something. A packaged feeling of #dissent that requires no actual effort. That Johnny is barely remembered even as a symbol, his body dumped in the wastelands outside Night City with only a few old-timers and a drink at the Afterlife to remember him by, immediately gives the lie to this framework.
This disconnect from a modern dystopian framework and lack of prepackaged anesthetic #dissent is exactly what frustrated many critics when Cyberpunk 2077 first came out. NPR’s Jason Sheehan repeatedly bashed it for “talk(ing) tough and play(ing) like some kind of anti-capitalist anarchy generator,” calling it “like Starbucks selling lattes in decorative ‘All War is Class War’ mugs” because 2077 didn’t, in a confused misinterpretation of the game’s central ethos, “burn corpo shit” and didn’t interrogate its world of violence enough to his satisfaction (Granted, to find the game’s true themes and interrogations of its world, Sheehan would have had to engage with the game and the parts where it literally looks into the camera and tells you what it’s trying to convey, a thing that apparently proved difficult for many reviewers upon release.) The Kotaku “re-review” by Luke Plunkett drills further down into this, revealing that once Plunkett engaged with the game (though they seemed to take a cockeyed approach of doing the main game first and only then dipping into the sidequests) they got a better idea of what CDPR conveyed.
If Cyberpunk 2077 was a modern dystopian story, the criticism of its writing would make sense. Flimsy “#dissent” requires no nuance, no engagement. It’s exactly what it says on the tin. Riley MacLeod, formerly of Kotaku, called the game out for “making its anti-establishment sentiment feel hollow” because V “can side with corporations and cops as easily as gangs and fixers.” However, this critique elides interrogation of V’s cynical attitude and by extension the game’s grand throughline of choosing how to live and exist among other people that permeates every conversation with Johnny. Kotaku (like other publications) also missed the unnerving fact that the heavily militarized police force in Night City finds itself so overwhelmed with the onslaught of violent crime that it’s outsourcing much of its work to “Uber, but for violent murder.”
Meanwhile, NPR’s Sheehan asserted that the lack of “punk-ness” brought the game down and echoed Kotaku’s complaint of narrative confusion. The root of this criticism, to me, stems from a desire for as much #dissent as possible and all the bluntness it entails. Yet longing for simplicity (while understandable) leads to the pernicious belief that dystopian narratives in games must be a power fantasy where authority is dismantled. This creates a stark contrast to excellent games like Pathologic 2 and Disco Elysium that similarly engage with dystopian dialogues about power and powerlessness without providing definitive answers.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t a modern dystopia. It’s an older, unfairly overlooked form of dystopiana, one that asks questions that don’t have an easy answer or a tidy solution. Cyberpunk at its best is a morally complex genre where levels of ambiguity hold sway, where “good guys” are forced to make bad choices and aren’t always as good as they seem. It eschews the obvious for the cerebral in a way that is anathema to the normal modes of media publishing. That isn’t to say stories of resistance and deliverance don’t have their place, but that’s an entirely different toolbox and an entirely different set of tools than dystopian literature. More aspirational genres (fantasy, space opera, social SF, etc) are better suited to that.
Everyone in the game is some form of sleazy or sketchy or morally ambiguous and inhabiting a world of casual violence and avarice because that’s the point their society got to. You shoot people for the cops because the cops pay well and reward you for your freelance gigs, even though the cops are as unethical t as the rest of the society. You are bombarded with offensive marketing and sixty different gun manufacturers. Your misery and awful situation are repackaged and sold back to you, and no matter how determined you are, at the end of the day, you can only do so much. All legends die, those who don’t leave for peaceful obscurity rather than face the time where their number’s up. You can only choose how you live within this broken world and who you help. While there’s optimism, while you can end some stories hopefully, it’s a very cynical viewpoint that offers no answers to the questions it raises.
But isn’t it time we acknowledged and discussed the questions being asked? 
Sam Reader is a literary and film critic specializing in horror and weird fiction reluctantly haunting the northeastern United States. In addition to their biweekly column Dissecting the Dark Descent for Reactor Magazine, their work can also be found at Ancillary Review of Books, Boss Rush, The Gamer’s Lounge, and at their personal site, strangelibrary.com. When not ranting about art and culture, they can be found drinking too much coffee, hoarding secondhand books, and trying not to annoy anyone too much.
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