No spoilers
After spending quite a few hours in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, and a couple hours reading through the world of responses it has created online I am left with two inescapable feelings: The game is good, and it heralds the last gasp of cyberpunk as a genre. Not just because its doubtful that another piece of media in this vein will match it in terms of production — the game is as close to an action movie I’ve ever played, and a damn engaging one at that. Its because the game is just an action movie. There's nothing else there.
Modern cyberpunk is reading a warning sign after shoving your hand into a garbage disposal. Its an aesthetic we can wrap around a story because it no longer has anything else to give us besides that. It is a parody of our world that falls flat for the same reason that shows like SNL can’t wring a drop of humor out of say, Rudy Giuliani farting and making a crazy person rant in court — you can’t match the absurdity of that situation and trying to only reveals how sad it is. In the game, you see a political commercial supposed to be outlandish showing a politician shooting a bill, but that has become old hat in the US. Corporations making somber ads to sell us on how hard they’re eventually going to work on fixing the problems they’ve created is part of a regular news cycle every disaster. The worst has already come to pass, and we’ve accepted it.
There is no longer an imagined future, just a cynical retelling of where we are right now.
In the end, the most “cyberpunk” thing about the game is the product itself — a multimillion dollar corporate product that promised to let people escape the world and faces backlash from people who expected that and were let down. There is no escape. But the hype cycle we saw with this game will soon start all over again at the next promise of escape, of something bigger than life, something that will change you. Fill the void.
We no longer need a genre to tell us about a possible future when that future is already here. Like the game itself I am left feeling cynical and sad, with not even imagination left, just the desire to escape.
