Picked this up after hearing “Cyberpunk is good now” and hey, it is! It probably was always at least a little bit good, but the extra time in the oven has made it into something pretty special. Does the eventual arrival of a genuinely compelling piece of art retroactively correct the way the people responsible for creating this thing have been treated by their employers? Probably not! My ideal world for artists and technical staff is probably one where less games like this get made, but this is maybe the best case scenario for what a gigantic AAA game like this looks like. I’ve got nothing to really add that hasn’t been articulated better by someone else over the last three years, but my really complicated feelings about this thing and the way it was made have coalesced mostly into positivity.

I played this after falling off Starfield - a game which made me wonder if I just disliked big-huge immersive RPGs and they just weren’t for me anymore - and I ended up falling in love pretty much immediately. They’re very different beasts, but I really prefer the density and friction of Cyberpunk’s approach to this type of game compared to Starfield’s compartmentalised slippery procgen. Night City feels big, but most importantly, curated - even small encounters and sidequests feel imbued with intention. The microstories on offer can vary wildly in quality, but in each one you can feel the touch of a human’s fingerprints.

Unionise your workplace!