In February 2020, Grimes, everyone’s favorite internet goth, put out her first album post-marriage to Elon Musk and her newfound status as a wannabe modern Sirkian heroine. Entitled Miss Anthropocene, the absolute catastrophe of an ecofascist screed, absent of blusteringly perverse grief present in her previous work, was an almost divine feat of bad timing. If it were released not two months later, at the peak of “nature is healing” tweets in the face of the first of many ever-expedited environmental catastrophes, someone out there might have actually listened to it.
I bring up this album because the best track, “4AEM,” premiered as part of Cyberpunk 2077 promotional material, and the spectre of Grimes’ work is smeared across every ray-traced particle of the game. From the rampant orientalism, the bizarre edgelord fetishization of trans bodies, obsessive cacophony of sexual objects in place of embodiment, to the ignorant slide towards the technocratic hellscape of Silicon Valley, every one of the game’s obsessions is borne out of an old Internet. Most of all, 2077 seeks to fulfill Grimes’ desire to transcend into a purely digital existence, beyond the physical world. In short, Night City is less a place in a game, and more an ever-shifting paranoid dissociation from which you cannot awake.
Much has been made about what the game is trying to say, as a cyberpunk story released in 2020 that’s built upon materially false narratives about poverty, greed, and capitalism and relies heavily on a carceral logic and individualistic streak of greatness. I have little of value to add to any conversation about the wonky dramatic impulses of the game itself, the generic and boring main campaign; I will mention that the opening six hours, clearly meant to be a tutorial for a seventy hour game, winds up spanning about a third of the game’s abbreviated runtime, the first of many instances of the game’s viscera embodying its cursed production. As it stands, the story is a rapid-fire collage of racist stereotypes and caricature, made all the more bizarre by intermittent and misguided attempts at respectability. An ofrenda is performed for a Latinx side character at their funeral, despite this being a Dia de Los Muertos tradition. The black radicals in the game, the Voodoo Boys, are never given an opportunity to voice their ideology fully, because the game cannot imagine a truly radical future. As for the Asian characters in the game, they’re…mostly sleazy businessmen obsessed with honor and family. Couple that with Johnny Silverhand’s band named, of all things, Samurai. Also, uh, there’s the gangs. It’s really fucking gross.
Johnny himself finds himself at the core of a game with no center. Played with delicious bravura by Keanu Reeves, he’s an an old school rock ‘n roll icon and also, by the game’s own constant labeling, a terrorist. The game operates with a perspective on terrorism as this amorphous act with indirect or unclear motivation or impact on society, a bizarrely pre-9/11 outlook, let alone more modern interrogations of the subject when it comes to white supremacist violence or antifascist movements. He exists as part of an implant in your brain that is killing you, two dying being competing for control of the same neural network. This forms a neat tessellation on the story problems with the player character V.
Like Commander Shepard before them, V is torn between being a character you roleplay and an avatar whose values and priorities are, by necessity of the crime saga at the heart of the main quest, far more limited than in the tabletop RPG upon which the game is based. Admittedly, the game’s trajectory feels more railroaded than it is. Most games in its lineage, like Bethesda and Bioware’s biggest titles, work to give the illusion of choice in dialogue and mission prompts exclusively. Cyberpunk offers far fewer of these, replacing these explicit measures with various character reactions and minor story diversions based on the gameplay tactics used by the player, basically a less visible (read: legible) version of the Fallout: New Vegas system.
The issue here is two-fold; These distinctions make little difference, and the underlying programming does not work. The game has five endings that all neatly abide by the regressive logic of a twelve year old Tesla initiate, so ignorant to the politics of the eighties, not to mention the subsequent four decades of technocratic surveillance state (yeah, we’re back to Grimes again), and unlike a game like FNV, Cyberpunk ushers you briskly away from any opportunity to leisurely explore the world, discouraging you from narrativizing even the most minor non-story essential play.
The other, bigger issue is tied to The Thing about Cyberpunk 2077 that has garnered so much controversy: the bugs. The game’s stealth mechanics malfunction, enemies T-pose and clip into walls, and it’s often unclear what fails because of a skill check and what fails because o a programming error. The game is dying in front of our eyes. The bodies, cybernetically enhanced or not, bullet fodder or companion, are transient, always unreal. You can’t even kill them correctly. The game gets away from the player and itself, breaking options and objectives at random. The race against the clock to get Johnny Silverhand out to your head is a moot goal. The transphobic advertisements that litter the streets, the girldick snarkily glitching out of V’s pants, aren’t triggering so much as further evidence of the fact that you are never given the opportunity to properly embody the player character.
For all this, the game is obsessed with sex, even moreso than CD Projekt Red’s previous outings. You can’t romance characters so much as single-mindedly pursue sex with them as the end goal of any subplot. The game heavily features sex workers, called “dolls” (ironic given the ignorant trans fetishization on display elsewhere). These workers are cast more as vessels for fantasy, neurologically linked to their clientele to offer “braindances,” fantasies of experience. The dolls are violently dissociated from their bodies during Braindances, and when they awake they are traumatized. Within the narrative proper, sex workers are given little more to do than act as props — Mcguffins, tragic figures, or crass scum with two lines of ambient dialogue. The total removal of agency in sex workers makes the leering eye with which Cyberpunk treats the game’s sex scenes doubly nauseating. This is, no contest, one of the most whorephobic cultural artifacts in recent memory.
There are also recorded, not falsified or sexualized, braindances, which serve as a kind of investigative data, and these are where the game is at its most interesting. You watch about a minute of a scene play out, and then are free to rewind and replay any point of that footage, flying around in third person to interrogate any visual, auditory, or thermal information picked up at the farthest perimeter of the character’s perception. It’s an intoxicating, brilliant gameplay loop, immersing the player so fully in its simulation that realism breaks.
Notably, these moments occur in landscapes of neon shadows, in the neural network of some in-universe machine. The remaining 95% of Cyberpunk 2077 is filled with assets; stairways, live wires, trash heaps. These areas feel more vacant, architecture crowded by polygons through which you bob and weave in search of something, anything.
In 2019’s Control, the architecture was simply dishonest: It evoked brutalism sparingly while playing into the half-century-old anti-communist propaganda that brutalism meant inhumanity and bureaucracy, compounding the imposing sublimation of its setpieces with scattershot and padded level design. The FBC wasn’t an unreal space; It was a lie. 2014’s NaissanceE was dreams of an architecture beyond humanity, with stairs too small to walk up led to, an algorithmically generated Winchester house. Surprisingly, Cyberpunk’s Night City has far more in common with these games in terms of its construction than the checklist laden landscapes of Ubisoft tentpole.
CD Projekt Red’s last game, The Witcher 3, for all its flaws, thrived because it was designed around its people, you moved person to person, an exhilarating chain of conversations and bullshit lore, this drip-feed exposition dump that I found comforting. 2077 offers you nothing so grounded. Quests are given to you through your phone, calls that interrupt whatever you’re doing, leading to an overstimulating barrages of texts mid gunfight about cars you cannot afford and do not want. Rarely do you walk up to an NPC in the world with no marker on your minimap and have them give you a quest, nor would the labyrinthine series of claustrophobically rendered crowds and alleyways particularly conducive to this kind of design. The people and cars, the things that give the space life, are noticeably impermanent: vehicles you steal will disappear, civilians loitering in a courtyard will evaporate when you turn around. Many of the sidequests offer little to no story content, instead becoming minigames for individual pieces of the cornucopia of half-baked systems that collide so recklessly in the main game and major sidequests. The apartment complexes and alley markets are redundant indicators of content, because you’re never expected to explore, or learn routes through the city. The game teaches you to blindly follow directions spewed to you by immaterial voices on your phone, in your head.
Similarly, it is frustrating and exhausting to drive through Night City, just as it’s frustrating and exhausting to drive through any major metropolitan area. But absent are any of the design elements you see even in something as callous as GTA V, where obvious remnants of failed city planning are retrofitted onto highways to promotes ease of commute between the more gentrified areas. Though ostensibly modeled after a Blade Runner-esque California, it is far more reminiscent of Grimes’ hometown Vancouver, a city famous for its nondescript aesthetic. Vancouver has become a go-to production location for hundreds of films specifically because of that anonymity. It is convincing as a city, but it is nowhere. Similarly, if you let your eyes refocus while driving through Night City, any illusion of life breaks; it isn’t just illogically designed, it’s was not built for people. It was not built by people. Except, of course, it was built by people, for hours and weekend and months and years. Everywhere you look, you see unfinished labor. Cyberpunk 2077 is a ghost town.
This explains, beyond whorephobia and racism and classism and bigotry, why it cannot conceive of sex work, marginalized existence, or criminalized action as labor, let alone collective action. And yet evidence of labor is everywhere, more obviously so than in other, slicker games. from the lovingly detailed facial animations, to the dozens of half-coherent quests that begin as immersive sims and devolve into a ten second shoot-out after the first dialogue prompt. When a game like Cyberpunk 2077 is expensive, that doesn’t just refer to the high end computers, monolithic cloud synced hard drives and other technological advancements. It is the culmination of thousands of developers working eighty hour workweeks for years on end. Obviously worker exploitation and unethical production are an industry wide crisis, but typically those games wind up so pristine that any outcry is drowned out by affection for the finished product. Cyberpunk has no such luxury, all its evils on full display. The game isn’t just “broken” in terms of glitches, unfinished in terms of polish or cut content, it is barely a video game. And specifically because it is not persuasively anything other than a labor rights violation, it is a uniquely upsetting experiences.
I hated almost every moment playing Cyberpunk. It was annoying, ugly, mean, stupid, clunky, and crashed every hour. I never want to return to it. But I cannot stop thinking about it, circling a city that collapses in my memory, trying to parse the particularities I saw in the faces rendered. Cyberpunk 2077’s world has no past, a present broken beyond recognition or life, and a future it refuses to imagine. It is the abyss and I can’t stop staring. And now I can’t stop listening to Grimes.
