I gotta say I approached this game with a huge degree of wariness, but my son had requested it for his Christmas present & I guess I had to address it from a position of knowing what’s actually in the game & what isn’t. What made me go “Agh!” was that there were adverts in the game featuring a trans or non-binary person whose body was objectified & who had a massive, MASSIVE, prn-star sized c*ck visible through their clingy skin-tight clothing. I thought, I don’t want to play a game that objectifies NB and trans people like this, this sounds nasty. But, having played the game a fair bit now I can say that yes, that advert is objectifying, but the game makes a point that *everybody* is objectified by the mega-corps like Arasaka and Militech. Everyone. There’s an ad using a woman’s boobs to sell dog food, another with a dude on a leash with the caption “Zeig Dich” in German, (“Show yourself”). S*x and human bodies are used as advertising throughout, and the whole point is the capitalist dystopia of Night City is a meat grinder that uses up and kills people. People made the point about the well-endowed trans person that HRT makes cocks quite small & not very functional, but we meet a guy in Watson early on whose crotch is smoking, because he’s had a cheap cybernetic dong grafted onto his body & it’s shorting out. Anyone, *anyone* therefore can have pretty much any kind of body if they want. Cybernetics is at the stage where folks get artificial arms as a fashion statement. There’s a gang who replace their eyes with a spider-like array of multiple sensors, and their leader looks like he’s had his frontal lobes removed & replaced with cybernetics. Anything is possible.
HOWEVER, within the game there are some lovely, heart-warming, sometimes heart-braking, attractive, well-written LGBTQIA+ people. The main ones that leap out are Judy, a feisty, nerdy lesbian lass, and Claire, the barmaid at the Afterlife club, who is trans, & who likes to race her truck in these highly competitive street races – but who’s only really into it because she wants to avenge her husband who was killed by a dilletante corpo. You can help her get her revenge or talk her out of it & help her that way.
Folks said it was copaganda, but the majority of cops in the city are murderous thugs, members of the biggest, most well-armed violent gang in the city. But even then you meet ex-cops who are either in desperate mental straits (Barry) or who were genuinely trying to help but got kicked off the force for trying to do the right thing (River). It’s a big city, lots of people, lots of stories. Some just awful, like the snuff-film makers who killed a Pastor’s kid & recorded the experience on a medium designed to let the user experience everything. I took the film off them & then visited karma upon them, killing the son before the father. There are the Voodoo Boys, with whom I sympathise greatly & think they’re fundamentally right but who are also so xenophobic against anyone who isn’t a Haitian from Pacifica that they use people & kill them off so as to maintain a firewall of security around their Reso Agwe, their island of separateness.
Yes, this is a violent game with some very dark themes, but it also has some great points to make about our world. It is so well-written that it’s had me shedding tears at various points, laughing at others and when it works right the art, the graphics are chef’s kiss. I’m glad I didn’t condemn #Cyberpunk2077 out of hand. Like they say of my home-town, Birmingham “It’ll be great when it’s finished”.
skiamakhos 