The most fun I had in Cyberpunk 2077 was sitting in the passenger's seat of a car, looking out the window, an activity that the game loudly informs you that you are able to skip at any time.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm part of the problem. I bought the game during this ongoing surge of popularity that seems to be going on due to the anime and the DLC announcement or whatever. I waited almost 2 years until the game was supposedly fixed up, I waited until the game's initial moment had passed enough that it did not so viscerally feel like an obvious laughing stock, until the game's defenders had quieted down enough that I no longer felt compelled towards contrarianism. There probably simply is not a better time for someone like me to get into Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a good time to get into this game at all.

To be clear, I was never hyped for this game, for a number of reasons. I played The Witcher 2 and I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the world, and I hated the combat, so I didn't play the sequel, and I had no reason to keep up with CDPR. However, I'm the kind of dweeb who watches all the big press conferences and sees all the new trailers and stuff, so naturally I had the game's title put in front of my face a handful of times over the course of about half a decade. Everyone falls prey to hype once or twice; maybe it's just a generational thing, whether it's each literal generation of humans born has their own ultimate zeitgeist letdown, or each generation of new hardware having its big new title that promises the world and never delivers. In any case, CDPR was putting up a lot of red flags from the start.

The thing about press releases, vertical slices, trailers, any pre-release coverage of a video game, is that you absolutely need to be skeptical of anything that isn't crystal clear. You should never assume that the game will contain anything you haven't seen. I like to think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to video games, and even in the last year or so leading up to the release of CP77 I had absolutely no idea what kind of game it even was, let alone the scope that they were aiming for. Everything was pure suggestion, nothing but talk, and the only explanations I can possibly think of for why so many people bought into it wholesale is because of the good will that CDPR had previously built up, or because many of the people on the hype train were either young or naive enough to not immediately be able to sniff out bullshots.

So what kind of game is Cyberpunk anyway? It's the same kind of game as Donkey Kong 64, or Haven: Call of the King. Haven: Call of the King really is one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had with a game in a while, like looking at the Rosetta stone of the modern AAA language. Calling Cyberpunk a game feels kind of silly; what are its core mechanics? There is shooting, yes, but you could go hours without doing it. Like those two other games I mentioned, Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly a game where stuff just happens.

You talk, you drive, you walk, you get into the passenger's side of your car for the first time and if you have half a brain in your head you think, "hmm, I wonder if the game is going to do something that will require my character to have their hands free to do something that isn't steering", and sure enough you do set-piece car chase rail shooting section. You do some cover shooting, and it's kind of like if every cover shooter you played 10 years ago was more clunky. You finally get let out into a part of the city that seems like something resembling an open world, and you find that it's still an empty façade, a more geometrically complex equivalent to the seemingly endless fields outside the main play areas of Overgrowth.

Something genuinely frustrating to me is that in both the opening desert area where the Nomad path begins and in the aforementioned initial city area, the game limits how far you can go with a Battlefield-esque warning that you've gone too far. Cyberpunk is far from the only game to do this, but even a game like Recore at least tries to contextualize this mechanic by putting little signposts up and saying anything beyond that point is radioactive. In Cyberpunk, you literally just get a message on your screen saying not to go that way until you get further in the game, and you get warped back if you keep going.

Think about a game like Ocarina of Time, the opening area is surrounding by walls of earth, in a lot of those old games even outdoor areas are sort of boxed in, always conveniently in some kind of canyon or ravine. There are two paths out of the town, both of them are blocked until some kind of progress is made. The blockage is in this case a character who stops you and provides some narrative justification for why you can't go that way, and moves once that reason is rendered null. Now, blocking a path with an NPC, ultimately a game object, feels sort of "game-ey". It's the kind of thing that we might avoid today unless the game is being made with some kind of limitation or there is some kind of unique narrative reason where having a person block a door makes immediate real-world sense. But isn't it still better than reminding the player not just that they are experiencing fiction, or making them recognize the mechanical layer of the game, but perhaps even worse making them directly confront the fact that this is a piece of software? There's probably some moron thinking "well, yeah, software is pretty cyberpunk right? It's part of the theme!"

Why even have such a big city if I'm just going to look at the mini map the whole time? Why animation facial expressions and motion capture gestures on everyone if I'm going to have to keep my eyes glued to the subtitles, or rather, to the area of the screen where my dialogue options will appear, so that I have time to read them before the other character snarkily asks if a cat's got my tongue.

There's so many weird things about choice. The character creator has quite a number of fields which contain options, but none of those fields actually has that many options. It's less of a character creator and more of a character tasting, it exists just to give you a sense of what a person in this world is. It doesn't have the haircuts that it has so that you can choose what best suits how you might imagine yourself in a hypothetical cyberpunk story, it presents a limited number of options to prepare you for the specific mold that you will have to fit for this cyberpunk story. It would be almost admirable if it didn't feel like the same obvious "Choices Matter" trick that every faux RPG for the past decade and a half has been pulling our legs with.

Something that still drives me nuts about Haven: Call of the King is that I really don't know how impressed I should be with it; it's a genuinely kind of terrible game that's mostly only made interesting within the framework of its world being a technical marvel for the time, but you spend so much of the game not really interacting with the world in any meaningful way that you have to wonder how much of it is a trick, because regardless of whether this impressive fractally generated world around you is "real" does not meaningfully impact the actual play experience in any way. Cyberpunk is, ironically much like the Deus Ex reboots, mostly just a linear cinematic AAA action game that is only made interesting by the idea that it's actually a role playing game. Though, like with Haven's massive multi-planet game world, this RPG element is mostly just a framing device, something to periodically gesture towards in order to try and remind the player how impressed they should be.

I'm playing the game on a machine lugging around more tera-FLOPS than even a person who actually knows what that means can really comprehend, and I'm still constantly shocked by how poor the texture quality is. I tried playing a bit of the game with ray-tracing enabled, and just as with literally every other game I have ever played with a ray-tracing option I am not only unimpressed by the visual changes, I genuinely cannot believe that anyone chooses to play games with this level of performance.

When I got to the braindance part I was reminded of Remember Me, and decided to look up a gameplay video on youtube. After a feature film's worth of Cyberpunk's sleep-deprived drivel I was completely blown away by how more emotive Remember Me's voice performances were by comparison. Everyone in Cyberpunk talks like the kid in high school who chews tobacco in class. Some of the most annoying dialogue I've ever heard delivered in a tone most reminiscent of a distant relative that you don't really know dismissively telling you "that's just how life is, man..."

It is just genuinely depressing to think of how much work went into something this cold and stale.

Fun fact I actually didn't experience many obvious bugs, mostly just general jank, like the game generally just feels terrible, characters' pathing is just constantly breaking, etc. However, the very first time that I booted the game up, instead of seeing the splash screen that's supposed to appear, I found myself staring at a completely solid white screen, so that was a good first impression.