Cyberpad Denominator

"Your life your strife your fear is clear
You're scared you dared to feel sincere"

 

Syntax - Tower of Power

 

 

I'd started a completely blind run of Cyberpunk 2077 but it's really not enchanting me right out of the gate so far. Granted I'm impressed with the size and detail of Night City as well as the well-polished combat mechanics (auto-leaning around corners, etc.) at least in the first fight or three. However, I'm quite annoyed that they wasted development time to implement customizable schlongs but not arrow / numpad key rebinding (always hated the WASD setup) and it seems much too console-friendly in general (a.k.a. idiot-friendly) so far barely hinting at an RPG side of things to lend its Grand Theft Auto routine more complexity.

I'll probably give it a pass for the moment and go back to play The Witcher 2 instead, see how that turned out. Still, a couple of quests past the tutorial, something bugs me.

, sample package mouthwash, tiny bars of soap, single-serving friends,

This is not my apartment.

Sure, I know, it's "V"'s apartment and I'm just playing V, this premade character with premade friends and premade life goals and premade aesthetic tastes. I've always preferred blank slates onto which I can project more aspects of my own personality, and my persona extends to my base of operations. Though of course a customizable, functional lair would be preferable, some games can manage to render the simplest digs homey. Your first apartment in Bloodlines, for instance, obviously could not be customized, but immediately established your newfound position in society, your bower, your extended phenotype as a bottom-rung parasite, a grungy, decrepit second-story gutter... where you belong. Cold iron, cold filmy glass, denuded furnishings, outdated electronics, a nearly contiguous layer of grime punctuated by a single overstretched, pathetic little rug failing to splash some color into the scene. Death and waste and degeneracy. Vampirism.

Customizability aside, V's apartment on the other hand is so generic as to express nothing at all, either about my own character's tastes or about my social milieu. Neither rebellious nor indulgent, primitivist nor futuristic, stark nor elaborate, carnal nor mechanical, physical nor cerebral.

 

I can only hope that its very lack of personality deliberately condemns prefabricated consumerism, employed to offset later, better defined environments by its mundane human hive tedium, a springboard for monomythic escalation.

I can only fear it rather reflects CDProjekt's target audience, a console game straining for mass appeal, afraid to threaten its customers' all too human expectations. No ode and no dirge, incapable of melancholy or ambition, mere human resentment toward the extranormal, metastasizing monotone mediocrity.

Come on, IKEA boy, I want you to hit me as hard as you can!