For this week’s critical play, I played Cyberpunk 2077, an open‑world RPG from CD Projekt Red that you can find on PC and consoles. The game is aimed towards mature audiences who want a dense open world rather than a quick power fantasy. My previous understanding of the game was plagued by awareness of the crappy rollout of the game riddled with bugs, but now, this game offers a vastly more enjoyable experience. It captures the player by making Night City itself the main character and by tying every formal element, whether that be dialogue choices, hacking minigames, and even billboard ads into a single feedback loop emphasizizng how the environment changes based off you.
The first decision screen already sets the tone. You are presented with three options for your main character, V’s, background. Street Kid for a life coming from the city’s depths, Nomad to be raised in the barren outskirts, and Corpo to be an elite of the city (that eventually falls from grace). I picked the Street Kid life‑path for V because it felt the most canon, as in it made the most sense given my understanding of the game’s themel. Fifteen minutes later I was leaning against a dive‑bar counter trading jokes with the bartender, Pepe. The dialogue tree gave me slang options that popped up only because I was a Street Kid and could help me out in specific situations, similar to how the other two backgrounds could’ve given me their own advantages. In other words, the city reacted to a single menu choice. That tiny feedback loop made me feel ownership over neighborhoods I had yet to walk through.
Night City’s open streets reinforce the attention to detail. Kabuki market is the first hub I reached after the opening heist. Instead of marking important stalls with bright icons and cluttered HUD overlays, the game asks you to scan by sight and sound. I heard a ripperdoc’s bone saw before I saw the clinic door. I noticed a noodle stand because steam drifted across neon, making text on a holographic sign glitch in and out. The city teaches you to read light, noise, and crowd density the way another game like For Honor may teach you to read enemy tells. It is environmental storytelling as interface. After a short gunfight tutorial the quest marker vanished, leaving me free to walk. I spent ten real‑time minutes chasing a garbage drone just to see where it would dump the bags. It led me to a roof cluttered with broken guitar amps and a shard titled “Noise Complaint: Maelstrom Party.” World lore delivered by robo‑trash route, no talking heads required.
The dynamic of hacking adds yet another layer. Early quickhacks are tiny, like distracting an enemy by making a vending machine explode, but the moment you trigger one the UI scrolls full of Corpo code strings. They disappear too fast to read unless you stop moving, which taught me that information is literally background noise here. It feels like the city is alive with data you can tap if you slow down. Taking a phone screenshot of the blur and zooming in later, I found corporate memos referencing a r
iver clean‑up contract. The text serves no purpose in early hours yet hints at some corruption to uncover later.
You can see a similar agenda in the game’s character design. I eventually obtained a Kiroshi Optic implant, cyberware that lets you highlight enemy weak points. The ripperdoc chair clamps around your skull while the screen saturates red. It’s like body modification in the form of a car wash: quick, dirty, business as usual. The cinematic ends with V blinking new HUD elements into place, telling us how Night City views the body as hardware, celebrating cyberware and its “enhancements.” Beneficial traits come from money, not biology. Harmful traits like low stamina are temporary until you buy a Sandevistan heart. Disabilities, at leas
t this early, feel erased rather than addressed. If there was one suggestion I could make, I think it would’ve been cool if the game offered us more low-grade implants early in the game that would occasionally glitch, highlighting the fragility of treating flesh like hardware and force us to visit shadier ripperdoc clinics in dangerous districts.
Compared with other open worlds I’ve played, Cyberpunk’s early game stands out because it rarely pulls the camera back to brag about scale. Unlike how games like Assassin’s Creed use the Leap of Faith to zoom out and show the expansive world perched from a tall building, this game zooms into the minute: an altercation happening on the side of the road, a braindance shop blasting ads for synthetic memories, a kid kicking a can at a vending machine that calls him a “valued consumer.” These small moments turn random screenshots into evidence of societal layers. They echo the article’s ecological worldbuilding, as Night City’s outer rings of politics, history, and technology press inward on the citizen center.
Not everything is perfect however, the first car you buy handles like soap on glass and bugs are occurring left and right, breaking the illusion that every object is curated. Yet even those glitches highlight how ambition can stretch a system, and they make you hope for later patches that have already transformed the game from almost unplayable to many people’s favorite.
In just a few hours Cyberpunk 2077 convinced me that caring about a game world does not require encyclopedic lore dumps. It only needs mechanics and art that keep nudging your senses, letting you discover patterns and rewarding you for looking closer. Night City feels alive because its tiniest details react to who you are, what you equip, and where you decide to linger. If the beginning can do that much, I am ready to experience the rest of what Night City has to offer.
