Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty - The Definitive Review

Dogtown and sleaze-boys

In William Gibson’s first Cyberpunk short story collection, Burning Chrome, he manages to deftly define the entire genre with a few paragraphs. Most notably, the opening story Johnny Mnemonic paints the necessary picture with almost exquisite efficiency. Within a few lines we’re drawn into a dank, foetid urban dystopia of grim actions powered by grimmer motives dripping their degraded ichor over near-future technologies that have long lost the sheen of the newly-manufactured. Johnny Mnemonic’s world is battered and grimy while awash in fluorescent glows and laser-beam diffusions, and as the story unfolds it tells a tawdry tale of a man on the run, a Yakuza assassin on his tail and a deus-ex-machina superheroine that steps in to save Johnny’s bacon. Oh and there’s a dolphin. The stakes here are Johnny’s and Johnny’s alone. His fuckup, namely to have inadvertently stored Yakuza property in his head, is as small as the story. The narrative is tight and street-level, and its journey upward to the rafters of the futuristic, yet ruined, domed city is as much about providing a tour of this portentous town as it is a transition upon which story elements can hang. It ends with Molly besting the assassin by turning his terrifying monomolecular thumb-wire against him, lopping off the hand bearing the thumb of lethality, with the assassin plunging to his death as a result. Johnny signs off in the closing pages, describing a new life of criminal enterprise in the sprawl’s streets and yet we never find out just what the brain-borne mcguffin actually was. It’s just some Yakuza thing - and this is all it had to be to serve the story, to help us live in that world. In just under 20 pages, we have been transported to a whole new domain of science fiction. Johnny Mnemonic really is that complete a summation of prior vestiges and new ideas into a singularly identifiable genre concept. And it’s brutally trivial, wonderfully street-level - pedestrian in its ambition because that’s far more real. Just one of a million possible noir-soaked tales that could come from that setup, from that absolutely captivating, charismatic new world. And it’s worth bearing this in mind: William Gibson wrote Johnny Mnemonic a year before Blade Runner was released.

What a great shame, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 decided to take after the 1995 motion picture of Johnny Mnemonic rather than the defining manifesto for the entire genre from which it takes its name. Of course, Cyberpunk is much more officially associated with the table-top RPG but again, this all takes the route of least resistance to the most bombastic. It’s in this self-fellation of raw egotism and the constant need to give the player narcissistic supply that both Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty make their biggest stumbles. Really it’s the main story at fault, for the main story is fucking stupid in each. This of course, is fine because Johnny Mnemonic - The Movie also has a fucking stupid story. Where the 1981 narrative keeps itself grounded, the 1995 movie takes flight into overblown territories with remarkable verve. Where the literary Johnny never meets his Yakuza nemeses, the movie Johnny faces off against the CEO of the corporation the data was stolen from (who is chasing him with a katana). Johnny also fights against a cybernetic Jesus assassin and ends up being the saviour for an entire afflicted population. It’s all so very, very, disappointingly silly. Cyberpunk 2077 is riddled with bits of Johnny Mnemonic - The Movie, not only in having Keanu in it, but also in the way the main-story fave ripperdoc Viktor Vector is essentially Henry Rollins, and how V’s seizures from the relic implant (which, in a grand gesture of pathetically transparent artifice, only occur when the story wants them to) directly mirror the wig-outs from the film’s NAS sufferers. But really, the bigger crime is that same puppy-dog eagerness to embrace the tropes of the sensationalist, the cheapness of ludicrously high stakes, to snuggle up to that sense of the pig-headedly over-dramatic expansions of the Johnny Mnemonic movie. Cyberpunk 2077’s completely unapologetic hyperbole is there from the off. It’s in the placing of an anonymous outcast within the hoi-polloi and then immediately rocketing them into a hotel room with the heads of the gameworld’s dominant zaibatsu, in order to watch some sensationalist familial drama play out and then be forced into doing something really stupid to create some personal stakes. In the case of Phantom Liberty, and not being one to find itself wanting, it’s completely fine to have you helping the fucking president of the nation shoot their way out of a crashed shuttle. With Dogtown’s setup and so on, I can absolutely see the paean to Carpenter’s Escape From New York, but the president in that is a useless politician¹ who only meets his saviour in the third act, not some spec-ops level supersoldier popping melons alongside you within ten minutes of the DLC starting.

The tortuously long and winding arc of Cyberpunk 2077’s main story is plagued with dubious choices. A whole section dedicated to tiresome rockstar-cum-terrorist Johnny Silverhand’s emo fantasies, those of reliving a remarkably cringeworthy and heavily cliched rock-and-roll lifestyle is delightfully unwelcome in every respect, right down to the brainfuckery of trying to have embarrassingly awful coercive sex with Rogue in a deserted drive-in while (in my game’s case) being a completely different gender. This is rapidly followed by a desperately dull Blues Brothers tribute in getting a band back together so Kerry Eurodyne can indulge in more cringeworthy rock-and-roll antics, which highlights a particular problem in Cyberpunk’s narrative concept - when it’s trying to be cool, it fails spectacularly. This jarring anachrony in making Johnny’s rock band some nexus of coolness within the game’s heart reminds me of Billy Idol’s much-mocked multimedia dabbling with Cyberpunk culture, or the tryhard punk survivalism of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s² mid-80s ‘sonic assault’, which tried to claim alliances with Gibson, Cameron’s shallow-minded idea of Tech Noir, the visual vibrancy of 8-bit videogames and so on. Of course, it was just as shallow and misplaced an attempt to buy relevancy as Idol’s Cyberpunk concept album. The computer age, of course, developed its own soundtrack as microcomputing invaded the instruments themselves and no leaning on the sonic and theatrical traditions of rock and roll was going to stop it. If rock contributed anything to electronic dance music, it was the punk DIY ethos and certainly not the posturing or the posing which Cyberpunk 2077 painfully forces you to participate in. This is seen most definitively in the passive, near-static form of Vince Clarke who, from his Depeche Mode days through to Erasure, extolled the virtue in being the inscrutable synthesist, just another Kraftwerkian showroom dummy, a Numanoid robot. The on-stage persona is that of the deeply focused technician, the backroom master who lets the vocalist take all the limelight they want. Contrast this to Cyberpunk 2077’s incredibly tedious rock gig sequence, with its QTE to make devil horns to the crowd as you rock out. It’s so much more Wyld Stallyns than it is a supposedly legendary rock band that accidentally harboured a murderous asshole with a penchant for low-yield nuclear devices.

In many ways, Silverhand is the totem for all that is unnecessarily self-important and coercively forced in Cyberpunk 2077. From his first apparitional hauntings, his false laconicism, eternal rebel posturing, hypocritical moralising and arbitrary, unwelcome invasions dance through the game’s wealth of quality like a rivulet of some obnoxious bully’s piss dribbling across an immaculate sandcastle. It’s just there, indelibly marking this beautiful construction with imposed effluent. In every imposition, he mouths off with an air of the edgy outsider, presumably to function as some extant narrator for V’s journey, but comes off as an arrogant prick. Johnny is an consummate bellend of a character and annoyed me so much that I was overjoyed when the story let me call him an asshole at some critical point where V and Johnny discuss their relationship. That sequence where he begs to let you surrender control of V to his whims, only for him to behave like a horny teenager, was the zenith of the Silverhand arc’s race to pathetic debasement. I am so fucking tired of his faux sigma-male bullshit. He personifies the way Cyberpunk 2077’s peerless world is held hostage by worn-out traditions and narrative retrogression. CDPR, despite its fantastic pedigree, can’t help but repeat the same old pitfalls of forcing a narrative that needs to apply to all possible player types, even though the game design encourages highly individualised character builds thanks to a nicely hybridised class system. It fulfils this narrative homogeny by completely ignoring what you’ve done.

Hocking’s Ludonarrative Dissonance is perhaps a throwaway term these days, but the fundamental sin is just as present in Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty as in any narrative-led game. The fiction of the story is persistently allowed to override the facts of the player experience. This is ably demonstrated in the first big story mission, the hotel heist wherein V gets infected with Silverhand and your enforced and entirely unearned best friend dies. Prior to the mission, you are simply told that Jackie is now your very best friend and really very important to you. Now, before you commit to the mission you can go off and do side content. Of course I maxed the shit out of that to get some decent abilities and gear under my belt, so I would go in nicely equipped for whatever challenges would be thrown at me. We’d already been introduced to Chekov’s Videogame Boss in the form of Adam Smasher, with his hulking Cain-from-Robocop-2 frame being intimidating enough and his demeanour that of another total prick, and knowing we’d be fighting him at some point meant I was very well prepared. This included having accrued a shitload of medkits. So when Jackie was lying next to me in the Delamain cab, bleeding out from mortal wounds, it was absolutely laughable that my V didn’t mention the 120 medkits in her top pocket. I mean, the count was right there, in the fucking HUD! Therefore, the death of the enforced best friend had zero dramatic impact on me. The main story’s fiction had ignored my experiential truth. Even in our fucked-up states, I can’t believe either Jackie or V couldn’t have popped a syringe in each other when we were practically cuddling. Not to drop the ball on this, Phantom Liberty rubs the scabs off with those painfully important Relic malfunctions as a mere amuse-bouche to its narrative railroading. One such seizure occurs just as V reaches the Moth bar to discuss a big plan with Idris Elba and his ex-partner. Stumbling through the door, V writhes around on the floor and after concerned questions from Idris and co, hammily relays that these attacks are “gettin’ worse every day”. This came after I’d spent a good five or so day-night cycles doing Mr Hands’ gigs without a single twitch from the Relic, so that was a fucking lie. What’s worse is that the seizures are so contrived, so obviously dictated by the story, that they’re just dumb. They serve little to no purpose other than reminding the player of what they’re never allowed to forget whenever Johnny pops up to add some quip.

If you’re tiring of my unrelenting tirade against Cyberpunk 2077’s main story, then I’ll turn to the good stuff. I wrote about my infatuation with Panam, which was of course due to the main story forcing you to partner with her, but despite the narrative hyperbole, I found Cyberpunk’s spiritual nourishment to come from the moments of human sentimentality and a personal sense of duty and sacrifice. It came from my choices that were earned by the game from its allowance to build relationships with its narrative-propelling NPCs on the player’s terms. Aside those romances and the semi-successful attempts at human intimacy, I have the fondest memory of going back to rescue Goro when the Arasaka security team explodes into that hotel room to rescue Hanako. It was thrilling that the narrative allowed me to defy Goro’s orders to leave him behind - far more thrilling than the contrived action sequence it takes place in. It was one of very few times a main story mission let me feel like a real, actual hero, because it was my choice to go back and save the man who’d previously saved my life. I was saddened afterward that Goro Takemura faded into the background not long after that mission, turning up here and there on the story paths and playing a larger role if you go with the Arasaka solution at the Embers nightclub, but not really the same figure at all - horribly because the main story no longer had any use for him. Even though my compromises with morality and undying fixation on Panam lead to me taking her storyline as my personal choice for V, I was nonetheless struck with a sense of personal shame when Goro treated me with the utmost contempt in the credit-roll phone call. It was perhaps the single most impactful emotional moment of the entire game for me. The negative sense of having let someone down, with no way to atone, really stuck. And of course, it wasn’t some product of the grand arc or the romancing system. It was some tiny additional detail that could be just as easily missed by a different player. But because it was borne of my instinctive, principled choice in the heat of the moment, it was so much more real than any of the main story’s formally presented, carefully managed and artificially guided heroism.

The infiltration of the party in Phantom Liberty is a key example of how managed and guided heroism is so much more hollower and facile than my Goro rescue. The sniping sequence, where you’re artificially restricted from using certain skills in order to make things a challenge, is meant to have you working in partnership with Solomon Reed. But, if you do the job properly, nothing really happens in the infiltration to build any organic sense of companionship. You’re saving his life and helping him do his job, but despite the stated stakes and the soundtrack of drama, there’s not really much of any substance to pin any sentimentality on. The party itself is a bewildering anticlimax of colliding narrative beats, trademark hyperbole and a pleasing enough reunion with Izzy Wizzy. Of course it has a weirdly contrived one-off sequence where you use previously inaccessible cyber-powers to steal some literal identities in a completely implausible fashion. You also share a drink with Solomon to do some important exposition about each other’s vulnerabilities and, naturally, you get to meet Dogtown’s very own King face-to-face. Because of course you, a lowly merc, must absolutely have personal relationships with the most important people in the city. You can probably hear my eyeballs rolling in their sockets, but I really had no expectations of Phantom Liberty to stray from the path already set in the main game. Therefore I fully expected this to happen. Now, at the time of writing I haven’t actually completed the story, but I’m already frustrated with the crowbarring of Phantom Liberty into the main Cyberpunk arc. In somewhat ludicrous fashion, it’s injected into the main story before you reach any conclusions, but knowing what all the conclusions are makes Songbird’s promise to help you expunge Silverhand seem incredibly hollow. Even if that leads to some special new ending that means you never have to go and meet Hanako at Embers, my prior knowledge of the other endings has already spoiled that fork, making it feel absolutely artificial. I can’t really understand the logic in deliberately sabotaging and countermanding an already played-through story when you could have set it up nicely in a post-ending fashion by having V kidnapped, having the Relic reactivated by nefarious forces and so on. But perhaps I’m missing some terribly clever point that I’m yet to discover. However, given the general superiority of the story to ride roughshod over the game experience, I doubt it’ll satisfy me.

I’m really sorry you’ve had to wade through 2,500 words of annoyance and frustration to get to this part, but rest assured - the praise level is about to explode. The reason why I take such exception to the main storylines of both Cyberpunk and its DLC is because the world they hold hostage is fucking magnificent. The real joy of Cyberpunk comes from Night City and the side content. The gigs frequently hold far better content and thought-provoking narrative than the main story - and this applies as much to Phantom Liberty as it does the original game. Where that main narrative is an infuriatingly dumb action film, the gigs comprise a rich tapestry that builds a crushingly dystopian but tangibly complex experience of Night City’s sociology. There is a constant feed of grit and nastiness, sleaze and self-interested corruption, of the noir staples sent through a digital amplifier and upscaled into HD resolutions to create some chilling projections for future crime - and its punishment. The merc jobs largely function as police duties. The kill-or-stun choices for dealing with enemies make you closer to Judge Dredd than the mercs and operators of Gibsonian cyberpunk tradition, but the wealth of content and locales for it to take place in makes Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty one of the best games I’ve ever played. I absolutely adore it. Given the choice of approaches and the wide range of tools to facilitate them, the game is practically heaven for fans of the Bethesda Open World RPG. It may not offer quite the same degree of discovery, but it does reward exploration more often than you’d expect. I loved the idea of roleplaying a kind of moralistic executioner in my main run. I switched to non-lethal approaches for Phantom Liberty, but by then I had such deliriously overpowered Netrunning skills that I could afford to be. The early-levels V in my game had to kill to survive. Plenty of those skillset-building gigs and side missions stay with me - I remember a sequence about snuff braindances (VR sensory experiences, if you don’t know) that ends up with a mission to find the creator for them, and it turns out he’s deep in a braindance when you reach him. If I remember correctly, you can leave him in place for the police to deal with, or you can fry his brain. I took great delight in the frying, as you can probably imagine. The way ‘solving’ these kinds of crimes ties in so well with the abilities you’re given, added with formal police-oriented missions such as River’s character story, carves out an unseen niche in Cyberpunk 2077 to do away with all the stupid Relic/Silverhand/Arasaka bullshit and turn into your own kind of expanded Rick Deckard, clearing as much scum and criminality off the streets as you can. This idea of doing some good for the city, of somehow helping the ordinary people, is so much more rewarding than the egocentrism of killing (or at least violently incapacitating) hundreds of people because you stupidly put the wrong shard in your socket and ended up with a nuclear bellend in your head.

There is some vestigial ghost that haunts Cyberpunk, stemming from those ‘lifepath’ options at character creation and is cruelly extinguished with the intro missions before you become Jackie’s best friend. On reflection, I feel there’s an entire game to be had between my V’s ejection from her corporate ladder-climbing and the point where Jackie’s your partner in crime. A fat missing chunk of richness that, perhaps, is some potential prequel or tragically aborted DLC. There’s the spectral hint of a far more ambitious project than the game we ended up with, of something that perhaps was far more interested in furnishing the player with the content to build a living biography rather than the easily containable, digestible, commodifiable traditionalism of the main story arc. I do long for a big developer to take that risk, to see monthly singleplayer content releases as a viable commercial proposition. I know I’d pay a subscription to get 10 side-gigs a month, to have ‘find the lost item’ treasure hunts or cyberpsycho takedowns or perhaps string together some beautifully unfolding criminal organisation assassination run across an entire year. Or again, to perhaps use those merc skills to make a difference in the world, to plough the financial gains into projects for social good, to try and carve out some oasis of safety, rehabilitation, redemption. To make a mark on the city itself. We can look to weekly comics perhaps as a guide, or if we’re brave, the Soap Opera. There is no better illustration for the sticking power of a setting as somewhere for people to build decades-long biographies than the Soap. The UK has Coronation Street and Eastenders as these twin  urban settings for the ongoing lives of the working and lower-middle class and to my mind, it’s here that we can look for inspiration for how to best use the riches that Cyberpunk 2077 offers. It’s easy to understand why there’s never been a sci-fi Soap Opera, but videogames don’t need to continually spend on believable environments to imbed lives within. Night City has already been built, the lore rich and fertile enough to fulfil the millions of possible street-level stories that could spring from Gibson’s first definitions of the Sprawl. The only challenge is the will to turn towards a new way of supplying single-player content, a way that allows the studio to maximise the return on investment in building such a wonderfully triumphant world.

So much of the joy of Cyberpunk 2077’s experience comes from the sheer quality of the environment. I’ve mentioned before how singularly great Night City is, and the more time I spend in it, the more I love it. The complexity is breathtakingly realistic for the majority of its landmass. So many streets and alleyways feel tangibly real, as if the city itself is, at long last, able to climb out of an urban uncanny valley. It really does sink in as a real place, a real city of the future. Phantom Liberty’s Dogtown is no different, although its combat-ravaged semi-ruin takes on an air of grave resonance given geopolitical events over the last few years. From Syria to Palestine via Ukraine, there’s that unavoidable homology when you walk along Dogtown’s dusty roads and tour its shabby habitats. Yet there’s something so compelling in Dogtown’s dystopia-within-a-dystopia and its reconstituted, repurposed ruins. Like the rest of Night City, it has the scale and complexity to truly beguile, and there is a totally worthwhile and satisfying waste of time to be had in simply going for a walk. I joked previously about wanting Cyberpunk to support my dreams of being a paparazzi, and I’ve committed quite seriously to keeping this up. I’m not joking. Taking photos is now fully integrated into my play loop. And in a very real way, this shows what AAA can be at its very best. Cyberpunk 2077, in its post-Phantom Liberty patched form, feels like the true exemplar of the state of the art. I was lucky enough to arrive in Night City well after many of the bugs had been patched, yet it still finds plenty of opportunity to crash. I don’t really begrudge that, though. It feels like the game is really about the city, for the city is by far its greatest asset. Long after I’ve completed Phantom Liberty, I’ll still be going for a walk through those streets. I’m tempted to record a realtime wander from the starting megabuilding all the way to the furthest reaches of the desert. You know, a bit like those street-walking videos on YouTube where the prize is the ambience and colliding white noises of the city. I absolutely believe Cyberpunk’s Night City can sustain an equally satisfying walk. Or even a series of walks. And I honestly believe the environments are that fucking good, that the game deserves the bulk of its praise just for its city alone. After all, to make those silly, adolescent tales the entire point is to ignore the potential that’s squandered when believing the main story is the prime value of the artefact. If the clumsy, painful artifices to make those main stories work are the necessary evils to achieve such a catastrophically unimaginative goal, should we really be happy to invest our time in them? Why should we let so many fictions override the truths of what we witnessed, what we played, of what we made of ourselves in these increasingly real worlds? If Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty tell us anything, it’s that the worlds we create for these brilliant videogames deserve far, far much more than those petty indignities.

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1. Spoiler alert: when Donald Pleasance’s president finally gets his own gun, he goes absolutely fucking mental, because he is an awful politician falling to pieces after returning to safety.

2. Interestingly, Sigue Sigue Sputnik was founded by Tony James, bassist in Billy Idol's punk band Generation X. James once wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase 'Fleece the World', which naturally the band already did by using 70s delay effects to ape the then-novel (and prohibitively expensive) pitch changing and looping effects of digital samplers. The fact that James and Sigue Sigue Sputnik eventually ended up attempting market town discotheque floor-fillers with Stock, Aitken and Waterman for the band's second album underlines that perhaps the fleecing was always the point.