Cyperpunk 2077. Novel of the Year 2021.

Honesty time - when I first played through Cyberpunk 2077 it was with a crooked CD key that I found for a suspiciously low price ($4) on Ebay. The condition of using it was that I needed to download the game and play it without connecting via Steam to the internet. This essentially insulated my copy from the updates that were hurridly compiled then beamed down from the Steam mothership. The point is that through my own cheapskatery, I was playing an air-gapped ultra-early version of Cyberpunk that was riddled with bugs, probably longer than the more honest players were. The reputation the early Cyberpunk gained, that of a barely playable mess is well earned, yet the rage it stirred seems disproportionate and shows how we in the gaming world struggling to entertain ambivalence without the negativity consuming the good. Then again - they paid full price.

From this ambivalence comes a question of how does one judge a video game - there are so many possible criteria: - is it based solely on the strengths, the most immersive, the most cutting edge tech or do we simply focus on the least amount of flaws, the seamlessness of the playthrough?

Cyberpunk 2077 - even now - a year later is still a deeply flawed game. The police don’t chase, the physics can be very strange and the AI is still crap. I have since become an honest gamer and bought a proper copy that receives updates as they are released. What is galling is the unrealised potential of it, how business decisions by Red Projekt trumped the artistic and technology demands of producing a game that was complete. Yet I think that the game today, a year later is one of the finest games available on PC despite its flaws. This is all a matter of criteria - but if you judge it based on the criteria of a novel it shows itself to be one of the best games ever made.

Setting: Night City
Time for another confession: I am a total sucker for the world of Cyberpunk and Night City. I used to read the original role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 as if it were a novel rather than a rulebook. I used to love the different skills described - how having the Strength skill of 1 meant you could open a pickle jar, while 10 meant “no phonebook was safe”. Also the stories that, weaved together, made up the fabric of night city. The way that Cyberpunk 2077 revisits the lore and makes it a fully inhabitable world was right up my alley. This is me declaring my bias.

At its best (admittedly once some of the most critical bugs had been squashed) Night City is a living breathing city. It is packed and dense with inhabitants of immense diversity. The skyline is breathtaking - chunky towers rise up glittering above the street. Much work has been put in to create a fully stratified world - life on the street is packed, it’s grimy and violent, life is cheap but go into the towers and you will see a world of high-luxury and fine design. The battle of Night City is mobility upward. It is ubiquitous - those on the street want to get up there, while those up there will do anything to stay there. Never has another gameworld I have played been imbued with such desperation.

The city is a diverse patchwork: different areas have different gangs and subcultures. This is absolutely necessary for an open world game - but GTA doesn’t have the diversity of styles that Cyberpunk has. The Tiger Claws - look different, their weapons and vehicles are styled differently to the 6th Street Gang. The city cradles this ongoing turf war - gangs battle it out with each other and the police. If you piss a gang off you will become a target.

As in a novel these deft little touches give the sense of inhabiting a cohesive and fully realised world. That your path through, as the protagonist V is simply one story of many happening in that world - as you come into contact with fixers and do jobs you feel that world breathing. To give that impression is the achievement of a novel.

Just to add a qualifier here: I take the point that there is much missing from Cyberpunk. You get hints of just how expansive and intricate the world was intended to be: monorails that zing around are unable to be used, scandalously few buildings can be entered and the promised labyrinthine sewer system does not exist. This is indeed a shame and probably one that will never be remedied - but what is there is amazing.

The Characters
The characters you meet have depth and contradictions, they have their own backstory and distinct motivations. What’s more they are often unreliable. You are rarely sure if you can trust them or not. Yes, some of the scripting can be jarring if you choose a subclause - one branch ends on an angry note but then the character is instantly happy again on the next line. Overall, most characters have depth - their motivations are supremely human.

A particular nod is deserved here to the love interests. Panam, Judy and River are all flawed and hurting in their own way. If a romantic path is taken their relationship with V is a sanctuary in a ruined world. They are quite frankly romantic in themselves. From Judy’s diving through the town she grew up in that had been flooded to Ward’s guilt at failing his nephew - these characters have the depth of characters in an epic novel.

• V: The Protagonist * Has there ever been an open world that has successfully developed a protagonist? Perhaps in the Witcher series. The root problem is this: how do you overlay a character that has surrendered their agency to the player - while still making them believable? Take the GTA series - the player running down pedestrians one minute and then trying to build empathy between the player and the protagonist in another. It’s a flawed model. GTA 5 responded to this by having the player inhabit one of three distinct characters. It worked ok but there was still the sense of disconnect, the problem being less solved than distributed between multiple characters.

Enter V who early in the game has his personality fused with Johnny Silverhand - played by Keanu Reeves. This clever technique, one that has been used in many novels (think Fight Club) in which the protagonist’s mind is inhabited by a passive character that they debating their path with. It’s a literal manifestation of an internal conflict. Here it works excellently and, due to the terminal nature of this relationship (without giving too much away), it leads to a character arc for a protagonist with depth and complexity that I would argue has rarely if ever been met in a video game.

Again another qualifier: the different lifepaths (corpo, nomad, solo) are severely underdone. They do almost nothing to add to V’s character and probably should have been left out. If anything they subtract from his depth.

The Plot, the themes, etc
Perhaps most of all is the ambition and belief that as a text a video game is not a second class citizen. It does not have to be mindless violence with two dimensional characters. Instead Cyberpunk is most important because it has something to say.

In the beginning it was easy to write off the main plot which ended too early as superficial. The world too was flashy and immersive but was undermined by the cheap gags of crass GTA style advertisements that are beamed onto every surface. The slick weapons, the clunky fighting engine could easily distract from what was happening underneath. It is easy to write it off as superficial and broken.

I am weighing in here because I was genuinely moved when I completed Cyberpunk 2077. So much so that I went back and replayed it. I am still replaying it and as I am clocking up 70 hours in the world I am truly appreciating the game’s depth.

The more side quests I play, the more I realise that Cyberpunk 2077 has a very human centre. There are the obvious themes of human’s relationship with technology but more gripping are those timeless and universal themes - the evil of desperate circumstances, loyalty and betrayal, exploitation and the ambiguity of ‘good’, sexual violence and gender. Without giving anything away - ultimately in this unjust world in which anything is permitted - the price of evil is the corruption of character and the reward for good is human connection. Through this way Cyberpunk furnishes meaning to a player willing to engage with it and appreciate its depth. Like life if you go around blasting and ripping people off the game will be a hollow unfulfilling experience, but if you are loyal but smart there are human connections to characters that are rewarding in themselves.

There is bravery here and ambition that the writers of Cyberpunk believed a video game was not a secondary art form but could convey the human experience of our world via fiction. This is what all great scifi achieves but only very rarely is it done in a video game. I believe that beneath the neon and the chrome beats a human heart of depth and character. For this Cyberpunk is my novel of 2021.