CYBERPUNK 2077
in some ways i can understand why this is frequently taken as escapism despite being inherently dystopian. it's nice to think one person can fuck things up so much; it's nice to think there's solidarity. there's a doomed yearning that captures something very tender and a level of transgressive personal power & self-authorship that is, relative to our world, somewhat fantastical. the best bits are all when it's gentle, quiet, or anxious: bullshitting with jackie before the heist; the conversation with angel/skye in clouds; the near-silent car ride with judy in disasterpiece. there're louder moments of horror & spectacle that're successful in their own right too, but none of them compare to walking past crowds of people in broad daylight listening to "i really want to stay at your house" and having a real heavy loneliness wash over you
i don't care so much about the rest, and the game mostly lost me when the open world blossomed into a million different markers and sidequests and errands following the heist, but i still kinda like it. its retrofuturism is unchallenging & its provocations unconvincing, but no one in the rpg space is conveying the texture of personhood quite as well as cdpr when they're at their best. for as much as pondsmith's source material frequently reads as "american discovers japan and makes the dumbest extrapolations possible", when it briefly coheres into something you can plausibly believe as a lived-in space it's pretty good stuff. still not sure i buy that this city functions on a basic level, or any level, or even that people exist within it as opposed to in some sort of purgatorial plane laid overtop it, but whatever. much like wile e. coyote, i only need to fall for the set-dressing long enough to slam headfirst into it once in a while
will say however that if you're this desperate to shock people you should come up with something a little better than big dicks & brutalized women. truly a testament to the limits of the heterosexual imagination. cdpr never beating the allegations