Synopsis

In Night City, a futuristic metropolis ruled by corporations, gangs and cybernetic implants, V is a mercenary determined to make a name for themselves. When a heist to steal an experimental piece of technology goes disastrously wrong, V ends up with a mysterious chip implanted inside their head.

Known as the Relic, the device contains the digitized personality of Johnny Silverhand, a legendary rocker and rebel from Night City's past. But his presence comes at a price: the technology gradually begins replacing V's mind with Johnny's.

What follows is a race against time across Night City. Surrounded by corporations, mercenaries, gangs and figures from the past, V must find a way to survive before losing their identity completely, while uncovering the truth behind the technology that threatens to destroy them.

Overview

Some games are remembered for their world, their characters or a particular mechanic. Cyberpunk 2077 belongs to a stranger category: its public history has almost become part of the work itself. Night City was meant to embody one of the most ambitious open worlds of its generation. When the game launched in December 2020, that ambition collided with a far less elegant reality, particularly on previous-generation consoles.

Behind that chaotic launch, however, there was already a game with something to say. The player takes the role of V, a mercenary trying to make a name in a metropolis ruled by corporations, cybernetic implants and a permanent obsession with power. A heist goes wrong and leaves V with experimental technology inside their head, accompanied by the digitized personality of Johnny Silverhand. What was supposed to be a mercenary’s rise to the top becomes a race against their own disappearance.

Night City is the true center of gravity of the experience. Its corporate skyscrapers, working-class districts, elevated highways, clubs, markets and desert outskirts form less a clean, orderly vision of the future than an organism saturated with money, advertising, violence and technology. Cyberpunk is not merely an aesthetic here: implants, surveillance, the privatization of almost everything and the commodification of bodies directly shape the lives V encounters.

The gameplay combines RPG systems, first-person shooting, hacking, stealth and open-world exploration. Skills, weapons and implants allow for very different approaches, from a heavily armed mercenary to a netrunner capable of neutralizing a group without firing a shot. But the current version of the game also tells another story: that of a system gradually rebuilt through years of updates.

Key takeaways

  • Night City is more than a backdrop. Its architecture, corporations, gangs and inequalities give concrete form to the game’s cyberpunk themes.
  • The player genuinely builds their own approach. Firearms, melee weapons, hacking, stealth, cyberware and skills enable noticeably different playstyles.
  • The 2020 launch is part of the game’s history. Technical problems, especially severe on PS4 and Xbox One, led CD Projekt RED to issue a public apology, while digital distribution on PlayStation was temporarily suspended.
  • Update 2.0 deeply reworked the formula. Skill trees, cyberware, police systems, vehicle combat, balance and several core mechanics were redesigned in 2023.
  • Phantom Liberty completes this second life. The expansion moves part of the adventure to Dogtown and adopts the tone of a spy thriller built around new characters and political choices.

PANACHES review

Talking about Cyberpunk 2077 without talking about its launch would mean removing an essential part of its history. The game released in December 2020 and the one available today share the same title, characters and city, but they do not create exactly the same experience. Few productions of this scale make it possible to observe so clearly what several years of reconstruction can change.

What remains most convincing, however, is not a feature added through a patch. It is Night City. The city has the rare ability to feel immense without merely being large. A highway towers above a neighborhood saturated with neon, an elevator leads to an almost silent apartment, and a few streets away a gigantic advertisement promises a happiness that nobody seems to truly possess. The environment constantly tells the story of the world before the characters even begin to speak.

The RPG works particularly well when it allows the player to inhabit this contradiction. V can become extremely powerful through implants while living in a society where the constant improvement of the body also functions as a new form of dependence. The player accumulates power in a world that never stops showing what that power costs. Johnny Silverhand adds another layer of tension: behind his charisma, anger and iconic status lies someone whose own legend is not always as clean as his memories would like it to be.

The promised freedom is sometimes less radical than the impression created by Night City. Some narrative decisions genuinely matter, and certain character builds transform combat, but the city is not the infinitely reactive urban simulation that pre-release expectations sometimes suggested. Even after the updates, Cyberpunk 2077 is more convincing when approached as a large narrative RPG set inside an open world than as a total simulation of the future.

And perhaps that is what its second life ultimately made easier to see: the game hidden behind all the noise surrounding it. Cyberpunk 2077 did not become interesting because its problems disappeared. It became interesting because a deeply imperfect work eventually found a form much closer to its original potential, without ever being able to erase the history required to get there.

Good to know

  • Cyberpunk 2077 was released on December 10, 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with compatibility on the new generation of consoles from launch. Dedicated PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions were released later.
  • A few days after release, CD Projekt RED publicly acknowledged the problems affecting the PS4 and Xbox One versions and offered refunds. On December 18, 2020, digital distribution of the game was temporarily suspended on the PlayStation Store.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 returned to the PlayStation Store in June 2021, while the studio continued its work on fixes and improvements.
  • Update 2.0, released on September 21, 2023 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, reworked several fundamental systems, including skills, cyberware and the police.
  • The expansion Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty was released on September 26, 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. It introduces Dogtown and a spy-thriller storyline centered in part on Solomon Reed.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 had surpassed 30 million copies sold worldwide by November 2024. Phantom Liberty had exceeded eight million sales by then.
  • The game arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2025. This platform is not listed in the plateformes field because the current PANACHES taxonomy does not contain a specific nintendo-switch-2 value.
  • Update 2.3, released in July 2025, also marked the game’s arrival on Macs equipped with Apple Silicon.