Cyberpunk 2077: The humbling of ‘the game of the decade’
“All those folks convinced that this was Game of the Year or of the decade were wrong,” said Alec Kubas-Meyer in TheDailyBeast.com. The rollout of Cyberpunk 2077 last week was, per
Forbes, “nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.” Embarrassing in-game glitches forced developer CD Projekt RED to promise refunds to certain customers, and made the casting of Keanu Reeves and the company’s huge marketing campaign look like money burned. Even in an industry where rollout glitches are common, these were “next-level” distractions, including characters’ penises popping out of their pants inadvertently. Patches were promised, and CD Projekt RED will probably recover. But the lesson for every customer who’d been part of creating a beyond-Hollywood $500 million opening day for Cyberpunk 2077 should be this: that every release is “just another game”—not an aesthetic or ideology to build one’s identity around.
“The game itself wants so badly for you to think it’s cool,” said Riley MacLeod in Kotaku.com. You play as V, a cybernetically enhanced, gun-toting mercenary who rises from the underworld of a neon-lit megalopolis named Night City and must locate a chip that grants immortality. But the game “tries too hard,” bombarding you with genre clichés such as crushing corporate power, holograms, hacking, espionage, bodily modifications, and chain-smoking cyborgs who speak in technobabble slang. And the emphasis given to sex and sex workers “feels juvenile.” But the tropes of cyberpunk have survived since the
1980s because “they ring true,” said Adi Robertson in TheVerge.com. Night City presents a brutal vision of a hyperstratified society where corporations rule supreme, vices flourish, and everything has a price. Yes, the conflicts that arise for a player come across as “stock neo-noir conceits” rather than pointed sociopolitical commentary. But the creators have borrowed those conceits to deliver “crowd-pleasing fun” in an “incredibly ambitious” fictional world that you can spend many hours exploring.
And then there’s Keanu Reeves’ contribution, said Carolyn Petit in Polygon .com. The charismatic actor voices the digital ghost of a metal-armed, punk-rocker terrorist named Johnny Silverhand, “and I can’t imagine anyone else in the role.” Lodged in V’s brain, Johnny is always ready with some worldweary quip. It eventually becomes unclear “where one character ends and the other begins,” and that’s where the game comes closest to realizing “the bold possibilities so central to cyberpunk,” a genre built to explore ideas about identity, mortality, transcendence, and what defines being human. “It’s not the revolution I hoped for,” but it offers visions of people “trying to get by in a world that’s eating them alive.” And though the “awe-inspiring” expanse of Night City is the star of the game, “Johnny Silverhand is its soul—weathered, outmoded, often tiresome, yet still weirdly compelling.”