Rarely is a game simply named after a genre, but Cyberpunk 2077 states its ambition right out of the gate by taking the moniker of a popular sub-genre of science fiction. It is an adaptation of a popular tabletop RPG, which itself is heavily influenced by the literary genre.
Playing a few hours reveals Night City’s cyberpunk atmosphere. How much it does with the tropes and themes of cyberpunk is up for debate, but at least the world is unmistakably a part of the genre, as evidenced by the ten entries below. Unfortunately, the bugs and glitches are not a part of the cyberpunk aesthetic, and hopefully CD Projekt Red fixes these soon.
10 Cyberspace
When William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early 1980s, the Internet as we know it today was unimaginable. This made his vision of cyberspace as a separate virtual world so impressively original. Cyberpunk 2077 takes a cue from this groundbreaking work by having players move around and use the net like they are walking in a different world. It is not used as much as some players would like, however, since it really only comes into play during the main quest.
9 Corporations Taking Over The World
The Arasaka corporation in Cyberpunk 2077 is more powerful than most governments. It is free to operate without repercussions and those who work for the company sign their life away to it. This power corporations have is par for the course, and plays a massive part in the game’s narrative. Further back in the game’s lore there was even a corporate war that caused massive devastation.
8 AI
Technology goes so far ahead in this future, it makes one start wondering when something becomes human, and when something remains a machine or simply a piece of tech. Johnny Silverhand is a perfect example of this.
He is not really alive in the world, but his entire personality and consciousness is on a computer chip. His celebrity status is also an important part of the equation, as books like Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson explore celebrity culture. The question remains; can technology truly recreate and store someone’s soul?
7 Income Inequality
In Night City there does not seem to be a middle class. People are either poor and exploited or rich and the exploiters. Any job with a decent income requires you to sign your life away to a corporation or engage in illegal activities. Science fiction usually tries to mirror the times in which it was made, and a dwindling middle class has been a fear and creeping reality since the 1980s when the first edition of the tabletop RPG released.
6 Dolls
The idea of dolls comes almost directly from Neuromancer, which is also considered one of the first pieces of cyberpunk literature. In the novel, they are called meat puppets, but the idea functions almost the same. Like dolls, meat puppets are night workers who clients use to indulge in every desire. Once the session is over, the workers have no memory of what happened. It is certainly an uncomfortable idea, but the genre is talking about a future we’d like to avoid at all costs.
5 Brain Dance
VR is only just becoming an accessible platform. Even with its increasing prevalence, braindance in Cyberpunk 2077 goes a step further than what we have in the real world. With it, you relive people’s memories, feeling every sensation they also experienced, including death and extreme pain. This is more similar to a VR drug in Strange Days, a cyberpunk thriller directed by Katheryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron. A brain dance dealer even resembles the main character from the movie.
4 Crowded Metropolis
Night City is a typical cyberpunk metropolis. Buildings scrape the sky and people are piled on top of each other. The neon lights and crowded vistas overload the senses. It makes New York City look like an open field of the American midwest. While a lot of people love and appreciate city life, Night City is the worst parts of urban living taken to an extreme. Fortunately, a desert surrounds the city for more open areas. An open-world RPG set in a city like this is one of the game’s biggest strengths.
3 Undervalued Human Life
Life is cheap and death is around every corner, a result of the high crime and the corporations valuing money over human safety. Fortunately, this idea works well in a video game. It makes less sense for cops pedestrians to ignore Franklin, Michael, and Trevor in Grand Theft Auto 5, but it is more believable to think pedestrians in Night City would not be bothered by the occasional gunfight sounding off in the distance.
2 High Crime And Focus On Criminal Underbelly
Reading any piece of cyberpunk fiction from William Gibson usually puts you in the shoes of some criminal underdog down on their luck who comes face to face with the worst the world has to offer.
Later books like Idoru are told through several different perspectives, even that of a teenage girl coming of age, however. Even here, though, people are still either taking advantage of or trying to break out of the oppressive system of the future.
1 Blurred Line Between Man And Machine
At one point does one stop being human after they keep replacing themselves with spare parts and cybernetic implants? These two ideas are gameplay mechanics. This is something explored in stories like Ghost in the Shell. This also ties into the idea of AI and constructs that recreate somebody’s personality. Are they the same person or simply a representation? Is an old car or ship still the same vehicle if it has been constantly repaired with parts swapped out?
