HIGH TECH LOW LIFE
Naming your game after the genre of fiction it’s set in is a funny thing. Imagine if BioWare had spent the last decades peddling its two big RPG series, Space Opera and High Fantasy, before floundering a bit with the release of Mecha-Science-Fantasy. It’s especially bold when the genre in question is cyberpunk – a subcategory of sci-fi that has always been kind of nebulous, its edges as fuzzy as if you’d just swallowed a palmful of Dex octagons.
There’s a bulletpoint list of markers you can run through, sure. Cybernetic limbs. Mega-corporations. Hackers. Neon billboards and Japanese kanji. Ethernet cables that go straight into your skull. Neologisms that sounded cool and futuristic in 1984 but now seem a little silly and dated… and, yep, Cyberpunk 2077has them all.
Ultimately, though, these are empty signifiers. You could cobble together a generic golem out of these things and accurately call it cyberpunk – I’m looking at you, Netflix’s Altered Carbon – but that doesn’t get at what made these stories
