Cyberpunk 2077: The Definitive Review

Panam. Palmer. 5000 words.

Are you familiar with the concept of limerence? It’s a fun idea, marking out a group of obsessive attachment behaviours that cluster together under a semblance of romantic love, but is distinct from it. Limerence is unrequited love, non-reciprocated desire. We might all become increasingly familiar with the term as developments across AI, virtual humans of various genera, the blending of fictional characters with the social media of their actors and so on are providing ever-deepening pools for the hopelessly romantic to dive into. In some ways, our increasing knowledge of the cold, uncaring, ruthlessly ambivalent character of mother nature sets up an inexorable gradient where the only sane human response is more sentiment, more capacity to indulge the heart, more limerent attachments. The more dehumanised the systems that govern and entertain our lives are, the more hyper-human our response to their stimuli becomes. Faced with an antipathy about a world we cannot change and a sense of unstoppable momentum building toward some ultimate catastrophe, it’s natural to turn inward in search of hopeful immediacies and find love in all the wrong places.

Having fulfilled my genetic imperative of pair bonding and creating offspring, I shouldn’t be surprised that the reptilian hind-brain engine of desire will prod away at my unconscious in search of new targets. I know that growing old also comes with a requisite growth of one’s own capacity for sentimentality, but I can’t escape the fact that I have seemingly fallen in love with a videogame character: Panam Palmer. Perhaps this should be expected as the art of creating the virtual human edges ever closer to decent parity with real people, but having this happen within the confused, and yet somehow triumphant, Cyberpunk 2077 was something of a surprise. Funnily enough, Panam’s in-narrative flirtation arrived with as much surprise to me as my reciprocal feelings. Such is the haphazard, arbitrary nature of how Cyberpunk 2077 lays out its romantic offerings. More on that later.

If you need Panam explaining, either play the game or look elsewhere. There’s plenty of info on her and, reassuringly, plenty of people testifying their own love for Cyberpunk 2077’s heterosexual love interest and eventual queen. Naturally she’s modelled to be spectacularly attractive (some say based on actor Tristin Mays), yet in some gritty and, dare I suggest, less-objectified way. She bears injury scars on her hips. She doesn’t act as a sex object, and her sexual value isn’t really evaluated. There’s implicit sexuality in her romance path, but it’s a natural aspect to her and certainly not her sole value. Panam’s actual worth, both to V and the game, is far deeper and more valuable than any facile sexual currency.

I should make it clear I do not want to merely fuck Panam. There is an undeniable sexual attraction, but the surprising thing was how much more the feelings were than that. I wanted a relationship with Panam, which made me aware I was descending into a novel kind of obsession - a virtual limerence. To be honest, Panam’s supposedly erotic sex scene is a bit weird, a bit adolescent, a bit shit, and as I feared, grubbily cheapens the emotional dimension she brings to the game. Nonetheless, I was haunted by Panam and remain haunted by her. It’s hilarious to experience romantic feelings outside of the game, in your everyday life. I found myself laughing at the sheer absurdity of the depth and how it was so ludicrous to even contemplate. And while these feelings of attraction have an undeniable drive they dissipate very quickly, like phantasms of unnecessary desire. In the moment they are every bit as forceful and momentous as those first adolescent flashes of romance, but away from the source they evaporate, like some spectral cuckoo fleeing its stolen nest, completely dominated by actual feelings for real people. But still, they existed. Actual limerence is a lot more pronounced and permanent than this, but it’s the closest term I can find for the phenomenon. Panam lingers and intrudes into my non-Cyberpunk life like my very own Johnny Silverhand, but isn’t actually consuming my soul or making my body incompatible with my consciousness (in some remarkably unlikely and slapdash peril invented to justify an entire main story arc). 

In trying to divine the root of Panam’s sheer emotional grip, it emerges for me in quite a strange fashion. Her character is an attractive balance of complements and contradictions that seem more realistically human than the average by-the-numbers AAA heroine. In combination with her ludicrous hotness, this all combines very nicely into a complex whole. A huge point of difference is that Panam is one of very few characters in the game that bears no visible cybernetic augmentation. While you can suggest this adds a virginal purity to her and thereby enforces a patriarchal sexual value on Panam, I’d argue it’s more about homology - Panam is so powerfully attractive because she’s more like me than all the other NPCs. Perhaps my unconscious mind codes her as more real as a result, and therefore more valid as a limerent object. When processed by me, a mix of naive player and extrinsic researcher, the pieces fell into place to plant Panam firmly in a swirling maelstrom of unconscious desire. In short, after agreeing to share a bed in a motel a couple of missions previously, when Panam put her boots on my knee in that shack during that dust storm, I felt a visceral thrill of physical contact and romantic initiation. The microexpression animations were subtle yet powerful enough to entrance me, and then influence a suspicion of mutual attraction. Leaping too eagerly to touch a thigh prompted a ‘let’s just be friends’ dialogue. It all felt surprisingly realistic, like this was a perfectly natural interaction. A quick google reveals the tragic truth that Panam will always be out of reach and out of touch to my female V, so we enter a curiously teenage state of unrequited desire and devotional subordinance. I close my eyes and dance till dawn. Interestingly, the discovery of non-availability both in the game’s relationship context and Panam’s artificiality seem to constructively interfere, leaving a standing wave of anomalously genuine affection. I came here looking for money, ended up leaving with love¹ bubbling away somewhere in my unconscious mind. Limerence achieved.

A key driver in falling for Panam is the mixed messaging she sends. Born from a presumed budgetary necessity that sees 1-on-1 conversations include lots of flirting just in case you’re a heterosexual male, she does a lot to advertise some kind of attraction to you - whatever form you take. Panam flirts with a glance. Panam holds eye contact. Panam asks things suggestively. Panam flirts in dialogue. Obviously intended for the optimal male V path, they don’t change for a female player. This applies to all the romance-enabled characters. Instead of offering platonic and romantic paths based on the NPC’s authored orientation, if you treat the characters with a basic standard of decency the game runs romantic as default and intervenes when its romanceable characters’ gender preferences need to be expressed (or if you fumble one of very few tests for romantic progression). This reaches a spectacularly weird peak when smashing up a boat with Kerry Eurodyne and trying to grab a flagpole, ending up with Kerry staring lovingly into your eyes before suddenly remarking “no thanks, I’m alright”. He issues a romantic rejection, when there was no intent on your part. There isn’t an option to say “I wasn’t trying to kiss you”. At least with River, he’s pursuing you, so V can let him down gently. It’s sweeter and more human than the oddness of Kerry’s interactions. I have no idea if gay guys or straight gals loved Kerry or if hetero Male characters have different options with him, but it seemed very easy to get to a point where my female V was trying to plant a really quite inappropriate smacker on Kerry’s lips.

It was a lot easier to get to this unwanted flashpoint than getting close and forming a romantic relationship with Judy. I fulfilled this for my V, and part of that process involves the game forcing an explicit decision to start a relationship with Ms Alvarez. This made the Kerry incident all the more extraordinary given that I’d been roleplaying with such devotion to Judy that I’d filled the floor of her flat with bags of carefully picked meals. Blatantly on the rebound as the king of wishful thinking. Of course it’s too much to expect the game to actually recognise what my meta-behaviours mean, but wouldn’t it be nice if for once, it fucking did? The game knew Judy and I were an item! I’d also been through the process of rejecting River. I couldn’t romance him because Judy and I were already together and I simply didn’t fancy him. River’s jarringly shit robo-eye seems a tribute to 90s Borg cosplayers and his coat looks really dirty. It probably smells quite bad. I mean, give him sharper cheekbones, a beard and dreads and perhaps I could have a glimmer of attraction for a cyber-Lenny Kravitz, but there’s enough infantile rockstar worship in Cyberpunk 2077 with Keanu’s flouncy asshole edgelord, and I’m still not one for adultery. However where Panam is a feline queen in waiting, just needing the experience and the support to mature into a natural leader, Judy is the hard-edged yet supremely vulnerable bird with broken wings. And who am I to deny a second sentimental snowball to gather pace? My V finds herself as willing to support and protect Judy as she did Panam. V can light her darkness, we can count the headlights on the highway. It’s a wonderfully warm setup by the end, even if it is handled weirdly and a bit cheaply, without any serious depth for the ongoing continuity to these relationships.

I couldn’t claim a bitter rejection from Panam. Naturally my desperately honourable V swore total allegiance to her and remained a stalwart vassal and bodyguard right through to the end, where we had an extremely strange moonlit cuddle (?) on a floating hovertank as we sped to some presumed freedom. We may not be lovers, but at least we are bonded as sisters. Sentimental to the very end, yes, and how heartwarming is that? Given the negativity, isolation and self-centred amorality of every other ending, and even the entire city itself, this seems the best of a poor selection for ongoing happiness. But at least Judy’s along for the ride when Panam and I pilot the sex tank. I suspect my own projection is carrying the can here, but it raises a hard question about how you should implement romance and meaningful romantic relationships in a modern videogame. (Hint: abandon the tyranny of the main story arc and make sentimental fulfilment a key goal). But I have to accept it’s unlikely that my dream of some triumvirate of emotional nirvana will ever be granted the luxury of becoming Cyberpunk 2077 canon. Three women bonded by circumstance, two of them in love, representing the most badass mercenary team possible. It doesn’t stop me wishing for future content where Panam does the driving and overwatch with sniper rifles while Judy nethacks and records BDs of V’s supreme stealth theatrics for all three of us to profit. And then we all go for dinner and buy clothes for each other. By the way, did anyone stop by my place to pick up Nibbles before we bolted for the border? I love that cat. Though I did wonder if the double Mr Brightman cats in AI-world were some allusion to the bulldogs in Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s brilliant cyber-noir comic Hard Boiled, itself seemingly an inspirational document for Cyberpunk 2077. Hard Boiled presages the corpo-supremacy and sheer cheapness of human life in CD Projekt Red’s Night City. The city itself seems to borrow scale and grandeur from Darrow’s wonderful cityscapes. Though we’re quite a bit off matching the really quite astounding body-counts of Hard Boiled. Thank fuck there isn’t a set piece in Cyberpunk where you’re stuck to a burning car as it crashes into a televised sex-murder orgy.

Again, it prompts a question about how committed CD Projekt Red was to implementing relationships in the game. Most of the romantic pursuit seems geared towards unlocking sex scenes (wholly unfulfilling and ultimately unwelcome ones at that, showing how little has been learned since Mass Effect). The aftermath of said sex scenes is soured by a lack of decent continuity, depth or choice. The post-fuck text messages and calls are fine, but really not enough given the depth of affection players have for the actually quite excellent characters. The issue is they are one-sided, so V has little-to-no agency in these supposed romantic relationships. And for me, I just wanted to be able to call Judy from a food place and have dinner together, a walk by the river and a smooch before settling down to sleep. Instead, there’s a handful of conversations and repetitions of the same tract of dialogue when you visit her house. It feels like a real disservice, a squandering of potential - a folly, in fact. You’re given a ticket to the world, but the game won’t let you allow the truth to be said. It’s more upsetting, in a way, to have such a limp relationship system than to have none at all. To me, this strikes upon the cross-textural issues that plague the modern videogame. The default is commonly to follow the action film; to reach a crescendo, to have an explosive finale, irrespective of the deeper themes of the game. The finale and the summation of the key authored narrative supplant all other concerns, even overriding the deeply romantic and sentimental - despite the fact that the sentimental side is far more personal and far more affecting. They all end up being Die Hard or Aliens or Terminator 2 or Independence Day. Cyberpunk 2077 absolutely follows this, even though its endgame missions play out with the explosions early and wrap up slowly with more experiential, relational narrative fade-outs towards the end, yet it’s defined by that action crescendo. I never got the secret ending because you have to do things Johnny wants, but the three I could access all had urgent firefights and escalatory battles, leading up to big baddie boss fights. After killing the tiresome evil boss and making terribly consequential decisions, you end up meandering along heavily guided paths towards melancholy conclusions and only the aforementioned cuddle with Panam on a tank seems hopeful, especially knowing Judy is with you too. While I know commercial reality is always going to demand the action ending, I can’t help but pine for the rom-com, for the overly sentimental, for the romantic tragedy or the simple happy-ending melodrama. If you want a real step into the vast, under-explored possibility space that is ongoing romantic relationships in western videogames, consider the Soap Opera as a completely untapped teacher for generating romance-as-a-service content. There is much, much to learn, if only we can stop recapitulating the action movie boss fight as the de facto ultimate terminus for high drama.

After all the violence and degradation and sheer ugliness of the game’s dark future, I want to drown in a deluge of beautiful, serene hope - not glimpse it fleetingly in the extremely well-rendered irises of a woman I can’t romance. It certainly looks like Panam and her ending mission offers the intentional ‘good’ path; the most complete, the most optimistic, helping the most people. Panam and Judy work as two sides of the game’s affirming emotional core. All three rescue each other interchangeably. With Takemura and Hanako you have the harsh servitude and loneliness of corporate honour and leave with a profound sense of isolated mistrust. Johnny offers you self-destruction and raw nihilistic anarchy, or to become another hollow empress, every bit as cold, distant, unfulfilled as Rogue. Only Panam and Judy offer freedom, growth, support. It’s your payoff for supporting them. In a way, V is already following Panam’s path, just a few steps behind her. When you see her storming out of the Afterlife, you don’t know that soon, you’ll probably be stomping out in much the same huff with Rogue’s standoffish sense of superiority. And if you follow Panam’s story to the end, you too will join a family and look to a different future in different lands. It works so nicely as sisters in tandem, though I wish Judy’s path was somewhat more elegantly intertwined with Panam’s to bring that romantic component into a more harmonised focus, and possibly bump Panam out of my addled mind. I have a suspicion that if I’d gone through with the romance as a male V, having done the kissing, the tank sex, got the saucy pic, I wouldn’t have felt the same depth of ardour. When love takes over, you know you can’t deny that a desire like that needs to be unfulfillable to truly obsess the soul.

I did spend a short while feeling quite disturbed by my feelings for Panam. When something happens and you’re head over heels, you never find out until you’re head over heels. As mentioned previously, those rapidly fading feelings would resurface whenever I had contact with her. Even a text could make my heart skip a beat. It was quite remarkable, but also tinged with a certain terror at how tangible it all was. I took to TikTok to see if I was alone in this maddening hallucination and was extremely relieved to find I wasn’t. In the clips of her dialogue and compilation tributes to Panam’s greatness (and yes, bent-over ass waving), there were hundreds of devotional comments from fans. Everything from wishing she was real to coronating her as the queen of all videogames, that she and romancing her WAS the main story, that a legion of puppy-love fans dropped everything when she asked for help. One commenter proclaimed that he was all set to embark on a lengthy main quest mission when Panam called. Naturally they immediately ran to her aid. Clearly Panam’s charms had affected a lot of players. But in wading through social media in search of others with limerent attachments to videogame characters, I remembered another gamey woman that had called to me like a siren from the rocks. Another that infected my being and lingered long after playing. Again, she haunts me to this day.

I knew from the moment that Julianna Blake plunged her knife deep into my chest that she was a very special woman indeed. She was going to live beyond Deathloop and take up permanent residence in my soul. Certainly, the nifty bait-and-switch of suggesting she’s an ex-lover of Colt before revealing her as his daughter gave a small window of enticing fantasy. Here, her power dynamic over Colt, her superior knowledge, her advanced equipment and techniques have an alluring sexual charge, as does her physical beauty. But the real charm comes from that personality - Julianna stereotypes down to the crazy sexy woman who’ll ruin your life but you can’t resist her, but she is written and performed to be so much more than that. And so, so much is done through Ozioma Akagha’s stellar voice work. That siren’s call of masked fragility and overt forcefulness adds depth and intrigue. Her frequent mocking negs you into wanting to both defy and please her, while simultaneously trying to overcome her attempts to kill you. You predate each other, with only the familial relationship denying any sexual energy to the dance. It’s almost an abusive relationship, if it wasn’t for Colt apparently being an asshole at some point in the game’s lore and thoroughly deserving of Julianna’s tirades (and multiple killings). The history of Blackreef, Colt, Julianna, the other visionaries, the Eternalists is all wrapped in the unreality and unreliability of an island gone mad. Julianna could easily be killing from psychosis rather than oedipal necessity or murderous hedonism. We don’t have to trust the presented narrative if the context seems crazy enough.

In a wonderfully delirious way, Julianna embodies the spirit of the entire game. She is Blackreef and the anomaly and its bonkers powers. She is Colt and the desire for freedom and personal control. She is the entitled psychopathy and sadism of the other visionaries, she is the nihilistic hedonism of the Eternalists. She is the human expression of it all. I fell madly in love with Deathloop during my first play session, and I was never able to tell if it was because I was in love with Deathloop or if I was simply in love with Julianna. For me, Arkane had sublimated and distilled a choice of its finest systems into a whipcracker of a game, with a stupendously heroic call to the visual era of No One Lives Forever and powered it with the madness of the village in The Prisoner. Arkane had also created a fabulous antagonist. My truth was they were deliberately and magnificently intertwined. A desperately rare and precious thing, every bit as affecting as you’d expect from a game that wasn’t afraid to have its own actual love ballad, and a genuinely brilliant one at that.

Ode to Somewhere sings of doomed devotion, as much a lament as a celebration. And it’s one-sided, a confession if you read it from Charlie’s perspective. But in another way, the trip downtown and the city stars sparkling at night, getting high and a long holiday can also be about encounters and battles with Julianna. The cold city winds making everything old reminds you that time is passing, even if you are repeating a single day. It implies that there is something external to the loop and thus, when you actually do break it, you can witness the horror of shooting your funny, smart, beautiful daughter in the head and see her body not puff away into nothingness and residium to sanitise your violence, but fall slack-jawed and dead-eyed, with horrifying lifelessness, onto the furniture. It gives you the ‘best’ ending, but also Julianna’s contempt. If you really never ever, ever wanna let her go, the other choice of putting down the gun takes you back into the loop, presumably with a renewed relationship based in hedonistic violence. So Ode to Somewhere becomes less about the toxic love of Charlie and Fia, and more about a renewed bond between father and daughter, of choosing to stay together in the loop instead of breaking out and breaking apart. It’s interesting that protecting the loop and playing as Julianna unlocks so early in Colt’s game. It feels like a commercial decision more than a creative one. It makes much more sense to unlock her side if Colt chooses to preserve the loop at the story’s climax, for that forms and absolutely stupendous symmetry. Sentimentally invigorating, this non-ending is the ‘happy’ ending, not the one with a post-hoc video of an anomaly-corrupted wasteland and human emancipation, which bears the cost of Julianna walking off into nothingness. She seemingly survived a final loop, but the damage is done and she’s pissed off, forever. There is no way of gaining forgiveness, she’s simply gone. The player and Colt are left with the realisation right at the end, when we can’t go back, that Julianna is the game and that by ending it, you ended her.

Where Panam and Julianna diverge is obvious but they bear plenty of similarities, visually as well as in their characters. We can also trace a root character for both of them, one that was an icon in her time as well as a landmark in the development of interactable NPCs; they both owe a debt to Alyx Vance. You can immediately view Panam as Alyx 3.0. Similar builds, similar skill-sets, similar mindsets. Coldly analysed, Panam is an upgraded Alyx in every respect. Julianna shares the same ‘action girl’ tropes, but she is closer to another female NPC, somewhat Alyx-adjacent. I never personally felt any tangible attraction to Alyx, despite many memes at the time attesting to the opposite. She felt a bit too identikit, following on the heels of Beyond Good and Evil’s Jade and really feeling like a re-tread of the archetypal female player character, Lara Croft. I never developed attachments to playable female characters, because it felt way too fucking weird to fancy ‘yourself’. Alas Lara, Joanna Dark, Cate Archer, Vanessa Z Schneider, Anya Romanov² et al. As fabulous as you were, I spent too much time as you to fancy you. Of course, Alyx should be attractive with her coy yet knowing glances toward Gordon, her foreknowledge and admiration of your/his bravery and exploits, her rudimentary microexpressions conveying a hidden affinity beyond the platonic. There is definitely a romance to Alyx, but she never clicked with me. But on thinking back, I realised exactly why. I got Half Life 2 as part of the Orange Box on PC. Which means Portal, which I played first because it was getting all the hubbub and it was short. And that means GLaDOS. 

I think GLaDOS was the first videogame character to charm me on that same level as those anomalous, limerent romantic feelings for Panam and Julianna. I personally find it quite challenging to muster sexual desire for murderous AIs, but perhaps the wonderfully pitched and performed sarcasm and sadism made the ideal spearhead for penetrating deep into the soul. GLaDOS was actually funny, as funny as ‘real’ comedy, and consistently so. I love Portal 1 GLaDOS, but like a relative, and I did enjoy her cameo as a Delamain splinter in Cyberpunk, though it was a bit forced. Thankfully, there was no trace of a sexual component for me as GLaDOS always had a maternal aspect, but that didn’t stop the Internet from applying Rule 34 to GLaDOS immediately and with some urgency, underlining the implicit sexual desires that emerge from hetero male fanbases when subjugated by dominant female presences. It’s not a stretch to see Portal as a love story about Chell breaking out of GLaDOS’s abusive clutches, implying that GLaDOS does feel a sense of desire and longing, even if perverted and horrific in application, maternal or otherwise. I mean, GLaDOS sings that Chell broke her heart, after all. And for a quick side-note, what a curious thing - Portal, dominant female antagonist, haunting sentimental song. Deathloop the same. Is Julianna a modern GLaDOS? A testament to Arkane’s genius at thievery? Absolutely, and so wonderfully done on Arkane’s part. As with Julianna, much of the magic of GLaDOS comes from Ellen McLain’s incredible acting. You don’t even meet GLaDOS until the boss fight and by then, then she’s already deep in your soul. 

And so, we can almost rationalise away my infatuation with Panam. She’s meant to be physically super-attractive, the voice acting from Emily Woo Zeller ably captures her spectrum of emotions, running from sly sarcasm and weary cynicism to impassioned ranting and romantic whimsy. She fits an action girl trope like a glove but combines that with the penetrating personality of GLaDOS, and she flirts with you a lot - even when it’s impossible to have a relationship with her. All suitable tools for the trap, but there’s one crucial aspect that’s missing. It’s one that binds GLaDOS, Panam and Julianna together, and one that explains why I never felt this depth for the many attractive, fun, powerful women across lots of other games. It also brings a particular TV show into focus: Peep Show.

Many people I have spoken to will alter their tone and give recognition of an unspoken bond with the merest mention of the name Big Suze. In the Peep Show canon, Big Suze is arguably the unattainable ideal for Jeremy, a salvational romantic interest that’s forever out of reach. While Sophie Winkleman is undeniably attractive, she plays the role as written by Armstrong and Bain admirably well, to the point where I had to have serious words with myself. I was again feeling the pull of limerent ideation beginning to form and for fuck’s sake, you can’t fall in love with a TV character, can you? Well, obviously you can. The one thing that connects Panam, Julianna and Big Suze is viewpoint, or rather the viewpoint from which aspirant suitors observe them. Peep Show’s grand conceit was its first-person-always shooting style. While it gives peerless naturalism, it also grants an uncanny intimacy - almost intimacy by default. You can quickly measure, instinctively, how close people are when viewing in first person, and on crossing your particular boundaries, whether they are within kissing distance and how that proximity (both spatially and emotionally) will colour your relationship with that character. It’ll spark a lot more personal, instinctual fireworks than a traditional, third-person view of the same interaction, and, in Peep Show’s case, conveys a lot more empathy. We are living the emotional experience as much as we are coldly observing it, especially when a character provokes the right set of preferences. Often in Cyberpunk’s more personal conversations, we are as close to the NPC’s lips as we could be without kissing, especially with manual zooming. It’s a kind of personalised hyper-intimacy. In normal life it’s actually rare to have another human’s face take up 90% of your viewspace, but in first-person games we can choose to have that domination for nearly every conversation we have with any given character. We’re ably hijacking neural circuitry that responds to rare events by overloading them with stimulation, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that as modelling, writing and performance matures for the medium, the occurrence of limerent attachments will increase and intensify. In that sense, Panam stands tall as a milestone along a lineage of virtual humans. In the venture towards bridging that cliched valley of the uncanny, she’s a keystone in among the arches. At least she is for me, and a happily accidental one at that. I think if I hadn’t been so naive on that couch in that sandstorm, Panam wouldn’t have penetrated as deeply as she did. And accidents are more romantic than plans. And tragedies are more romantic than happy endings. So it’s fine for my V to give up on her hopes of marrying Panam and turn to the welcoming, mutually-traumatised arms of Judy, which is where my sentimental journey within Cyberpunk 2077 ends. For a game so wrought with forced issues of identity, so keen to suggest material and reputational attainment as hollow end goals, the fact that its happiest ending negates both makes it a romantic game, of a kind. Pursuing anything other than familial kinship and earnest romance leaves you empty and alone in Night City. Jackie’s dream meant nothing in the end and to get away, another way, to feel something about yourself you didn’t want to know, is the most human ending for a dehumanising place. But there was a third path. For me, the game’s offer to rewind each ending until Hanako is still waiting at Embers means we can pursue a far warmer and more intimate ending than anything offered formally.

I have a lifelong habit of leaving grand multiple-choice endings in limbo. I satisfy myself that the endings are all unsatisfactory and instead of picking the least worst, I choose a redefinition on my terms. I first did this for Deus Ex, because it didn’t offer a chaotic path of choosing to support the status quo. I did it again in Oblivion, Skyrim, most notably New Vegas. I preferred to wander the wasteland as a just enforcer, sworn to protect the innocent by killing the constantly-spawning gangs of raiders and legion patrols. In Cyberpunk, I chose Judy. Exhausted from the weight of helping the hyper-privileged Arasakas or lending Johnny a hand so Rogue can feel alive before dying, or even sacrificing precious time by helping Panam to lead her family to a new life, I chose to simply go home. Back to Judy’s, where I drop off another bag of food for dinner, switch to the naked outfit option, have a shower and then climb into bed. This act of banal normalcy, of ordinary life within a relationship, is its own happy ending. It’s about choosing to ignore Relic and Johnny’s infection, ignoring all the pushes and pulls of the game’s narratives and factions to just be with someone. The game absolutely allows you to do this. For when you set the sleep timer and wake up, Judy is right there, next to you. You then have to press a button to end this resting state. Lying together, Judy’s arms look almost intertwined with yours as she blissfully sleeps, micro-twitching with REM jitters, serene and tranquil at last, thanks in part to you. In the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077, it’s an oasis of intimate and private beauty, a nourishing warmth that heals and invigorates. I suspend the game right there, in that perfect moment. It’s as if V opened her eyes to make sure the one she can love is near, and then goes back to sleep, satisfied that all is fine as long as they are together. As for Panam? Well long live the queen. We’ll have to wait and see what DLC may bring, but I bet it won’t conjure anything more romantic or sentimentally authentic as just lying in bed, together, forever.

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1. This is one of many love song lyrics referenced in this piece. I would be overjoyed if someone bothered to try and find them all.

2. 10 points if you knew this deepest of deep stealth gaming cuts.