Note: This article contains spoilers for the ending of Act 1 (and a bit of Act 2) of Cyberpunk 2077.
It takes Cyberpunk 2077 about eight hours to introduce you to the main character. That may seem misleading. After all, the very first thing you do in CD Projekt Red’s ambitious, misguided, massive, controversial and ultimately unfathomable new action RPG is to design the person you’re going to play, the budding mercenary V. But while you can customize V’s appearance , their skills and even, in rough terms, their background, which you can’t do Cyberpunk‘s memetically cock obsessed character creator is determining who they really are to be. And the reason for that is very simple: they are nobody.
Not just ‘nobody’ in the sense that, at the start of the game, V is an untested entity in Night City’s ecosystem of various assassins, hired weapons, and overly aggressive used car salesmen. (Seriously, Mr. Hands, nobody wants to buy your old Hyundai.) What I’m saying is that V is no one; as characters they are fundamentally indescribable. Whether you choose a Corpo, Nomad, or Street Kid background, the character itself remains a figure, a fiery robot made up of dialogue choices that can turn a dime from psychopathic aggressive to saccharin depending on a player’s whims. Viewed from first person only (or already in-game infamous mirrors with bugs), V exists in the game as little more than a pair of hands that allow players to shoot or hack their hordes of largely anonymous enemies.
And even that basic level of identification is constantly disrupted by the haphazard nature of the game’s spoken dialogue, which might as well make you think, “Jesus, this guy is such a dick,” as the foundation for their success. (All these impressions come from a play-through featuring the male presenting voice of Gavin Drea, FYI.) Want to get off the grid and explore the game’s massive map or its treasure trove of near-endless sidequests? Don’t expect V to say anything interesting. In fact, don’t wait for V to ever say something interesting. For a game ostensibly about the horrors of losing your identity – more on that later –Cyberpunk makes every effort to identify its ‘protagonist’ almost impossible.
What’s wild about this disconnect is that it arrives in the aftermath of The Witcher 3, the primary source for the massive hype surrounding CDPR’s latest, and whose Geralt of Rivia stands as one of the best examples of gaming of a protagonist who somehow works both as his own person and as a robust expression of will of the player. No two Geralts working their way through the company’s widely celebrated 2015 epic will likely make the exact same choices at any point in the widespread plot, but they will all still come out. as recognizable versions of the same man. Part of that is thanks to voice actor Doug Cockle, who never makes Geralt sound like anything less than himself, even in the most extreme of circumstances. But it is also a testament to how well CD Projekt Red wrote the character; you can have Geralt choose completely contradictory answers to one of the game’s various moral riddles, and the writing will always try hard to justify his point of view – because Geralt is a well-defined character with his own wants, needs, and fears, and everything what he does The Witcher 3 reflects that. For a more recent example of this, see Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla: Eivor Wolf-Kissed may be a grade, but at least they feel like a grade with a consistent point of view.
V has no point of view. (Or her, every time I try to look in the mirror while wearing a baseball cap, it doesn’t exist anymore – but that’s neither here nor there.) Cyberpunk 2077 pawns who do their duty on a much more bankable star: digital ghost Johnny Silverhand, played with undeniable charisma by bona fide, not crazy, real-life movie star Keanu Reeves. After the high-tech heist that serves as the focus of the game’s first act, it inevitably turns pear-shaped (this is a cyberpunk story), Johnny’s ghost is eventually pushed directly into V’s head, starting a push-and-pull between the two, which is A) the most interesting thing in Cyberpunk 2077 in my about 20 buggy, hours of crashing with it, and B) pretty aggressively scribbled off the ‘Joker is now your imaginary friend’ bits from 2015 Batman: Arkham Knight. And it’s interesting not just because, hey: Free Brain Keanu. No, it works because Johnny is a real one character. He has consistent opinions, he has goals he is trying to achieve, and the things he does always make sense as part of the whole. Sure, he’s an asshole about most of these things, and he needs you to do all the legwork, but at least he’s an asshole with an ethos.
Even if V and Johnny have struck an awkward truce with each other, exchanging invisible banter, and hanging out with friends, Cyberpunk Constantly posits Silverhand’s unstoppable overwriting of V’s mind as something terrible. But why? Seriously, what actually gets lost: some random jokes? My skill choices in the game’s (admittedly robust and fascinating) character development system? My terrible taste in armored basketball shorts? Like I said back on top, by the time it tries to make you care about V’s survival, Cyberpunk has already fundamentally split his main character duties; Intentional or not, V is just the platform that allows Johnny to develop the most interesting aspects of his story. Johnny is the one with the connection to the characters that matter. Johnny is the one whose resources you tap into to get things done. Johnny is the one who cares about what happens outside of the basic incentive to survive. Johnny is the main character. V is just meat.
If this had all been intentional, it would have been huge and hugely subversive. If a game revolves around the decay of the human mind – which permeates Night City from its pungent stench of Grand Theft Auto-level cultural satire, the ubiquitous advertising, the inescapable reminders of how many hours of real programmer and artist lifespan were sacrificed to make the whole kind of work – spent his time persuading the player to surrender himself so that a more glamorous digital avatar would live, that would be a stunning rendition of the game’s core themes. But Cyberpunk feels much more like it thinks it is on humanity’s side, even as the void that is the central “protagonist” threatens to drag the whole thing to the abyss. Guns and genitals don’t help us identify with characters: choices do. And Cyberpunk‘s V consistently chooses to be inert.