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People were angry about cyberpunk the game having a downer ending, but that’s the deal with the genre. It’s always been tragedy. It’s fundamentally about what if we lose and fail to establish a revolutionary proletarian government, nothing good is coming for us if capitalism wins…
I guess people were hoping for cyberbright. But yeah it is a sad story, and there does seem to be an enforced fischer price esque only-happy-life-affirming endings allowed in the 2010s and 2020s.
I think by the point capital has established itself outside of humanity, no longer requiring flesh to think or act and perversely is able to alter humanity to its whim (by enforcing cybernetics on all strata of society), then we’re at the closing of hope for a better world. Everything within the Blackwall is just a soap bubble, the actual march of history is what happens outside the corporate net because that’s all that’s left to make a change in the world. Capital’s control is so complete that the working class has no hope to coordinate or make itself visible to itself, just a sea of lumpen. Marx said we either get socialism or the common ruin of the contending classes - cyberpunk is the latter.
In the setting, the world lost ecologically as well. It doesn’t come up as much but the ecosphere has completely collapsed. It’s very much a dead world that has just come shy of realizing it.
I loved that the game had a downer ending.
I took what’s probably considered the “easy” ending where
spoiler
V kills himself on a rooftop before he gets anyone else killed at his behest. It was exactly how I was feeling at that point in the game and it felt like this massive relief that the character had been pushed to his limit with the cruelty of that world in the same way I was.
It’s not as concise as the anime in it’s critique. Like the montage of bad shit they show during the world building in the anime? That’s most of what the game accomplishes.
I wouldn’t recommend going into the game hoping for more than what the show had, but I enjoyed my time. I’m desperate for any excuse to crouch walk around environments reading people’s emails, so I was pretty easily amused by the game. I didn’t play it until earlier this year when they did the big “next gen” (lol) patch.
