Cyberpunk 2077

This is an action-adventure game staged in a near-future city. Players customize their appearance and weapons while following a complex story. The main character, V, is assigned to go after a mysterious implant (a chip placed in the brain). As V, a player carries out a number of tasks in huge Night City, while being torn by the intentions of other characters with various backgrounds. Players can purchase weapons and vehicles with the reward money, and can also improve V’s physical abilities by installing implants called cyberware in V’s body. Eccentric fashions can be selected from a wide variety of options. Combining different options allows highly flexible customization of the appearance as well as abilities of V, a near-future urban dweller. In this epic game, a player can enjoy a story that changes according to the player’s choices and actions, while moving around this vast and tangled city from the glamorous downtown to hideouts of gangsters.

Named after a science fiction genre that built an era, including Blade Runner and Akira, this game is based on the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG series from the 1980s. Body modification is a characteristic of cyberpunk. Today’s technology partially realizes such modification, and body augmentation, including VR and AR, has become commonplace. Reborn as a subjective, open-world RPG with a realistic experience of such a worldview, this game was well-received and attracted attention worldwide upon the release of information. It was developed by Poland’s CD Projekt RED, a company famous for The Witcher series. The stoic reality-seeking company selected the theme of future cyberpunk, a shift from medieval fantasy, by rotating the time axis around the present at the center. Ever-existing human instincts, desires, and the disparities and discrimination derived from them—this work straightforwardly tackles these subjects and promotes players to think about life in the present era. (TOKITA Takashi)