This article discusses plot points from the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077.
“Everybody’s gotta go sometime, right? Why not in style?”
—Jackie Welles, Cyberpunk 2077
///
It takes a solid few hours of grinding in Cyberpunk 2077 to reach the Afterlife, the legendary bar that hosts the greatest fixers, solos, and other pay-to-play mercs in Night City. The name is a macabre echo of the drink menu, an enviable list of options named after the greatest and latest (read: deadest) heroes of the underworld. It’s a place where only the coolest of the cool can go, where mere entry means you’re on the come-up: making your name in the world, rubbing elbows with the reckless living and the restless dead. V arrives with a friend, and is mildly taken aback by his starstruck glee.
In cyberpunk, cool makes the world go round. Just look at the three “essential” concepts listed in the Cyberpunk role-playing game’s (Cyberpunk 2077’s source material) rulebook:
- Style over substance
- Attitude is everything
- Always live on the edge
Classic cyberpunk protagonists are outcasts, living on the margins of society: generally poor, often criminal, but well-trained in their digital world, sleekly dressed, and savvy as hell+. They have “a certain panache,” to quote Cyberpunk; their ocular implants look like mirrored sunglasses. They’re cool.
Like any subcultural aesthetic, this cool serves as the visual signifier of an ingroup, a locally-relevant language used to identify other sympathetic members. The cosmetic trappings of cool serve as the “intentional communication” of subcultural style described by Dick Hebdige, “a visual construction, a loaded choice [...] obviously fabricated,” held in opposition to the expression of “normality” and “naturalness” in mainstream society. In cyberpunk, they serve as a handy visual shorthand to separate our clever, stylish protagonists from the anonymizing corporate forces that serve as the ubiquitous enemy of the genre.
It makes sense, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 plays out as more of a cool fantasy than a power fantasy. V begins the game dreaming, with her buddy Jackie Welles, of hitting it big within the cutthroat, glamorous Night City underworld. Though tripped up occasionally by the brutal whims of plot, this proves an achievable goal. V will, in all likelihood, end the game with a much flashier car, a roster of fixers on speed dial, and a pretty heavy reputation. She’ll make a lot of money, replace half of her body with chrome, and achieve the gossip-driven fame she and Jackie always said they wanted++. Her place in society, however, never fundamentally changes.
This is because cool is only subcultural currency: it has a sharp boundary of relevance at the border of spaces where people give a fuck about who’s cool or not. But the world is much bigger than the Night City streets, and V’s undignified crash against the glass ceiling of her importance presents much of the dramatic tension of the game. V, you see, is dying. And she’s dying not because she lives in a dangerous place with dangerous people—a side effect of the street, another casualty of a festeringly unequal society—but because she got caught in the crossfire of the hubristic machinations of that other, upper world. Even as she drinks and shoots and fights her way into Night City notoriety, her agency in the matter of her own death holds steady at a cool zero.
V’s story is paralleled, in prophetic technicolor, by the agent of her resurrection. Johnny Silverhand is the closest thing Night City has to a folk hero. Tales of his death and glamour are told by V and Jackie and echoed throughout the music, the graffiti, and the underworld mythmaking of Night Citizens. Fifty years after Johnny’s glorious (and seriously destructive) death during the bombing of Arasaka Tower, he reappears in V’s head, a digital construct that dragged her back to life when she was disposed of by a fixer who thought she was too dangerous to keep around. But Johnny Silverhand, rockerboy and Night City legend, is still smarting from his own terrible meeting with the limits of cool. V’s lack of agency is nothing compared with Johnny’s: killed and copied by the corporation he wanted nothing more than to destroy, he has no presence in the world to speak of outside that granted him by V’s limited goodwill. This ugly dehumanization comes into stark relief when V takes him on a trek out to the oil fields north of Night City, where his body was left to rot by the men who killed him fifty years earlier.
“Can’t believe they bothered to truck it all the way out here,” Johnny says, looking at the faraway lights of the city. “Eh, better than the junkyard where I landed,” V responds.
There is no difference, in the greater politics of the world of Cyberpunk 2077, between the nobody thief V and the lasting legend of Johnny Silverhand. They might occupy entirely different levels of the subcultural food chain, but neither crosses that ingrained systemic line between the powerless and the powerful, so both are equally disposable. The cool that street rats and gangoons trade in means nothing to the corporation that orchestrated their deaths, though it’s the difference between food on the table and a lineup of gigs (mercenary and musical) in their day-to-day life. It reinforces the ultimate corruption of the system, the impossibility of true mobility, and the callous disregard of the ruling class for human life.
The core issues that plague the world of Cyberpunk 2077, the systems of greed and warmongering and moneymaking that dictate the lurid rhythms of V’s death, don’t give a fuck about how cool she is. V, like Johnny, is no one to Arasaka. There is no power fantasy when you have no power. She spends the last few hours of the game intermittently blacking out and coughing up blood; decked out in cyberware and weaponry, sporting all the aesthetic evidence of her ascent to the hallowed halls of cyberpunk legend, she is unable to save her own life. There is no ending where she lives.
After the game spends hours and hours building a sense of momentum, of competency, of cool, this ending might seem incongruous, but it’s also fitting. The game turns a race up the ranks of the criminal underworld into a sobering narrative about the collateral damage of corporate avarice. If V were to truly escape, live a life free from the systems of power and violence that afflict her world, she would be a different character in a different story. The most important exercises of V’s agency are not the guns she wields or the cars she drives, but the choices she makes with the limited options given her: some handed carelessly by the architects of her drowning society, and others bought with blood by people who love her and share her ultimate irrelevance. Those last fights hurt all the more for it.
After all, cool won’t save you. Just ask Johnny.
///
+ In contrast, the postcyberpunk movement of the '90s and early 2000s differentiated itself by starring normcore characters with day jobs.
++ This is aggregated clumsily in Cyberpunk 2077, where “cool” is the name of what basically amounts to a stealth stat and “street cred” plays the role of reputation, and more elegantly in the Cyberpunk tabletop game, where it represents “how ‘together’ your character is and how tough he appears to others.”
***
Maddi Chilton is games-adjacent and lives mostly on Twitter.