Cyberpunk 2077 followed me into my dreams
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia on December 11. Over Christmas I played after midnight, when everybody else was asleep. I wanted the days and evenings with my family. The hours I could spend in Night City came out of my sleep, and by the end of the first few nights you could probably have guessed as much by looking at me over breakfast.
I sat much too close to a very large television, with the Stadia controller in my hands and a headset on. Occasionally I’d go to bed, fall asleep and carry on making decisions in the game. The following night I’d load my save and have to work out which bits I’d played and which bits my sleeping brain had supplied. Of all the things I expected from buying a game over the holidays, extra missions written by my subconscious were fairly low on the list.
I’ve loved first-person shooters since Doom and Quake, but Doom 3 is about the last time I remember giving one this much of my attention. My hands still knew what to do when a door opened onto trouble. What took some getting used to was having a perfectly good reason to stand in the doorway and listen. A car radio further down the street, two people talking, the hum of something electrical overhead. With headphones on, I could turn towards a sound before I knew what I was looking for.
I was always going to like the look of Night City. I love that particular kind of science fiction where someone has invented a better pair of eyes and somebody else still has to run a noodle stand downstairs. Getting to spend time at street level, under all the expensive machinery, was the pleasure I’d hoped for. What caught me by surprise was how attached I got to the people there.
*** SPOILER MODE ON ***
Consider the ride out of Konpeki Plaza. Jackie is bleeding beside me in the back of a Delamain cab. I’ve just spent a fair amount of time learning to shoot my way out of a building, and now all I want is for the driver to take my friend to a doctor. The car has an itinerary. That polite, steady voice in my headphones made me angrier than anyone who’d fired at me upstairs.
Then the Relic starts overwriting V with Johnny Silverhand, the dead frontman of SAMURAI. Keanu Reeves is marvellous company for someone I’d sometimes quite like to throw out of the car. He can spoil a perfectly good moment by opening his mouth. A few hours later I found myself curious about what he’d have to say. That affection makes V’s illness much harder to sit with. Every time the picture breaks up and V doubles over, I want Viktor to get the thing out. By then I also have some idea of whom I’m asking him to remove.
I played both a male and a female V, and tried the Corpo and Streetkid beginnings. Corpo V starts the day being sick in an Arasaka bathroom. Streetkid V starts in a Heywood bar with a nose that needs putting back in place. I liked having those two introductions in my head. Walk into a corporate building as one V and you know what a threatening conversation sounds like behind a closed office door. Walk in as the other and you remember how that conversation lands on the people downstairs.
The romances were a good reason to go back. I loved getting out into the Badlands with Panam and the Aldecaldos. There’s a stretch around the campfire where moving a little closer to her feels like a bigger decision than anything I’ve done with a gun that evening. With Judy, the scene I keep thinking about is the dive into Laguna Bend, the flooded town where she grew up. I’m swimming towards a church with somebody who remembers walking to it. For once in this game I’m happy to let another person set the pace. I want to see what she’ll stop to look at.
Johnny’s customised Porsche 911 Turbo was pure pleasure. In a city that can put a computer in your skull, the man still has excellent taste in old cars. And then there’s his band. Refused recorded the music for SAMURAI, and “Chippin’ In” sounds like something Johnny really would have sweated through on a small stage. I’m susceptible to any game that gives me a good car and a reason to stay in it until the song ends. This one knew exactly what it was doing to me. Listen to “Chippin’ In”
I ran into a few minor bugs. On my connection, Stadia worked well enough that most nights I forgot where the game was running. The moment I took the headset off was stranger. A second ago I could hear traffic, a guitar, Keanu Reeves giving me his opinion on something. Now I could hear my own house. Everybody was still asleep, and I had just enough sense left to put the controller down.