Cyberpunk 2077: The Game That Moves Me Like No Other
a.k.a. The only video game I bought on two separate occasions, 5 years apart.
Cyberpunk 2077 combines elements from games and movies and places them in a high-tech package that would have been impossible a decade before. In fact, when it came out in 2020, it was so bad on the PlayStation 4 that Sony had to offer refunds for the game. It was so buggy it was like mosquitoes inside your tent in the woods.
On the PlayStation 5 in 2025, the gameplay is beyond solid. You can attack and defend against bullets and melee weapons in a variety of ways. You don't even need to use a gun if you enjoy chopping people to bits or smashing them to atoms. How you battle is largely up to the stats you build for your character.
Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Silverhand and becomes the voice in your head after trying to KILL THAT FROM YOU! I hear the expansion will be using Idris Elba for... something. He's in the trailer at least. Unfortunately, my 210 hours of gameplay has not included any of the Phantom Liberty Expansion yet. I'm absolutely going to get it, so don't worry.
The flexibility matters
CD Projekt Red (Witcher 2, Witcher 3) has turned Cyberpunk 2077 into their opus of the 2020s. This game is very, very good. My enjoyment of how all Cyberpunk 2077 systems might surpass the love of the Mass Effect series. I loved Mass Effect games so much that I went out of my way to buy a novel about that world. My fandom of things has never been so all-encompassing that I'd buy books about it. Outside of comics, anyway. Speaking of comics, I have read many of the Cyberpunk comics they've been putting out over the years. In fact, there is even an anime series about this Cyberpunk world.
For me, it's the flexibility of the systems powering the that excites me the most. In games with guns, I want to punch people to death. My friends and I called it the "bip." Figuring out how to use that big to finish opponents was my pleasure. I went out of my way to use the bip (and beautiful bip assassinations) in the Halo franchise. I built characters looking for new ways to bip in Destiny games. I bipped psychos galore in the Borderlands games. I tried to bip my way through Apex Legends, but the game said no. I still looked for a way to make it work with that triple shotgun in the game. I failed, but it was worth it.
Cyberpunk 2077 provides that role-playing game (RPG) depth my mind and fingers crave. In many ways, this is what my imagination has always wanted. I wanted to be able to do anything (like bip the shit out of enemies). Skyrim is great, but the fighting mechanics are nowhere close to the dynamism of Cyberpunk 2077. Halo and Destiny are incredible, but to me, the story feels more like a filter than a destination. I've purchased (but never finished... sigh) most games in the Dark Souls series, but those games make their bread from not telling you things. For me... it all comes back to Cyberpunk 2077.
I've often imagined myself in a future world where nothing has changed other than how cool my gadgets are. Cyberpunk worlds like The Matrix or Cowboy Bebop are terrible worlds that are fun to imagine oneself dodging bullets or using Jeet Kune Do to kick people off buildings. However, I would never want to live in a Cyberpunk world.
That's what I think our tech bros and AI CEOs forget. Most movies and shows about “the future” show how godawful the world would be to live in. Misery at the bottom and loneliness at the top. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is where we are now, and people talk about everything from the loss of jobs, to AI becoming sentient and destroying humanity like Wargames or Terminator. The next thing could be robot butlers, after that. I once wrote a song lyric about “Elon Musk dropping us off on Mars to make us mine ore for oxygen." Even we do create robot butlers, we will not create them in a way that people in the lower class of society could afford them. That's the dream versus the capitalist reality we live in.
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What about Solarpunk and Techno-Optimism
"Solarpunk aims to look beyond the limitations of capitalism and beyond the rift between humanity and nature." - Andrewism
On the flipside to Cyberpunk, video essayist Andrewism, and many others, is a vision of a future I'd like to live in. A world where we use our technology for more than creating a harder daily grind. A world where we use our drive to grow and improve to get back to the ancestral wisdom that allowed us to live in harmony with the environment. Don’t you love baby turtles?