Who are you Harry?: A Thoughtful Look at Disco Elysium

Late in Disco Elysium there is a quiet conversation between your character and his Partner Kim, where Kim asks you whether your drinking or drug habit makes you a better detective. And among the personal justifications, self-deprecations, and the boasts is one line: "It makes me the detective I am." This simple statement has stuck with me ever since I finished Disco Elysium.

In so many stories, statements like this can come off as cheesy, or melodramatic, but here it feels like a statement of fact. Does the drinking and drugs make me better in the game? I don't know. I've been doing it since I woke up. All I can tell you is that it makes me what I am. For better or worse.

The first scene in Disco Elysium is similar to the edges of consciousness from waking up in a drug addled or depressive mind. Brief flits of thought echoing through total darkness. Primal thoughts assessing the darkness itself, the emotions just wanting to fall further in. With effort you can drag yourself awake, but in those moments, it is truly tempting to wallow in the dark forever. But in some way you know you have to get up, you're just not sure on the details of why just yet.

After waking, naked, your clothes strewn around the wrecked hotel room, you stand and assess the situation. Your tie rotating on the ceiling fan, your pants are on the floor, shirt hanging off of the furniture, and you missing one shoe with a small shoe sized hole in the window to your apartment. Beyond that is a mess of empty bottles, a cassette tape whose actual magnetic tape has been stripped and scattered around the apartment. The visual provided almost comes with a smell, one of liquor and human refuse. After getting dressed you take a moment to look yourself in the mirror, looking back at you is a hapless wreck of man, with a puffy red nose, baggy eyes, and a beard and clothing that makes him look like a vagabond who has found just enough scrap to barely afford a hotel room and some hooch to keep him company.

What happened here? The answer is straightforward enough: Disco Happened. Years of carefree partying has left you a hollow wreck of a man in the late stages of alcoholism, whose very faculties have been so addled by drugs, alcohol, and depression that your own memory has packed up and left. You don't even remember your name. This is the tone the game starts you out on and from there it takes you on a journey about politics, philosophy, history, and self-destruction.

The mode in which you explore this journey are summed up in your basic statistics. In the beginning you get to negotiate the stat array for 4 different attributes: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Basically, how smart you are, your emotional intelligence, you physical acumen, and your agility. These correspond to 6 skills each represented by fully voices 'characters'.

During your run of the game, passive checks will be made allowing one of these skills to pipe up. Encyclopedia, which is just a repository of information about the world you're in, Drama, which assists in lying and telling if other people are lying, or even Shivers, a word for that certain je nais sais quoi that you have the gives you impressions of the world around you, pulling your own perspective back to the see the whole of the world you find yourself in. This internal landscape has a lot to say about who people are. We tend to think of ourselves in pretty limited terms: A smarty boi, an athlete, a sensitive drama kid. But this game eloquently argues through its mechanics that we are a complex set of competing interests, all are separate but in aggregate make up our experiences. The game in a way is about how deep a person is under the surface.

Disco Elysium on the surface is about being a cop. A statement as useful as saying Dune is about being the son of a Duke. The plot of game circles around the mystery of man who was hanged behind the hostel, but the central mystery of the story is: who are you? This can range from topics as complex and heady as philosophy, politics, and history, to as simple and straightforward as: what is your literal name? And what did you do?

I've deliberately refrained from using the name of your character, because even that is a point of contention in Disco Elysium. Early on, when asked about your name you have the option of making up one on the spot: Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau. Or you find out by talking to some drunks that the night of your drinking bender you went by Tequila Sunset, or Codename: Firewalker. But upon exploring your motor carriage that is half submerged in the frozen canal (long story) you find your badge and it says "Harriet Du Bois". But which name is your name? Is your identity dictated by the name on a slip of paper, requisitioned by your former self, a person you don't even remember? Or do you get to be Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau? Or Tequila Sunset?

These are the kinds of questions Disco Elysium is most interested in. And the sheer number of frameworks you can apply. Most directly being: What kind of cop are you? I went with a Columbo by way of a coke-addicted Dirk Gently. A kind of clever interrogator who feigned ridiculous idiocy to get people to open up, and always was working on the case even if it meant solving the mystery of an elusive cryptid because I knew everything is related.

What you believe, is often just as important. The game masterfully addresses belief in its Thought Cabinet mechanic. A simple menu where you can begin to internalize random thoughts that occur to you, the internalization process coming at a cost to intellect or psyche as these thoughts distract you from your work, but upon completion have great benefits in both dialogue options (which is the central loop of the game) and skill checks. The player will likely first encounter this when examining the body.

When you finally get behind the hostel and examine the hanged man, the corpse is in the late stages of decay. He has been left hanging there for a week, stripped of his clothing, dangling behind the cafeteria while a street punk by the name of Cuno pummels it with rocks. It was left there for various reasons, as an example, or out of fear, but mostly the body of the man was left there out of apathy. A sort of 'not my problem', mentality that seems to be prevalent in the city of Martinaise (where the game takes place), and likely in all of Revechol. Even you seemed to not give the first fuck about the body, arriving a full 5 days after the hanging, and then spending the following 3 days in a drunken Disco stupor that has left you with amnesia.

So by the time you actually get around to examining the body, the wreaking stench of decaying flesh is too much for you to handle without passing a very hard skill check. You throw up. This is where your Partner, Kim, tells you get "Get your shit together." leading you to think up the Volumetric Shit Compressor. The problem is simple, your shit is apart, so you need to come up with a device that won't just pull it together but compress it into the density only found at heart of dead stars. It's a delightful bit of absurdist humor, and a look into how we often visualize abstract problems. No you can't build a literal shit compressor that turns your shit into neutron matter, but the idea of such a thing helps you cope with your hangover.

Such thoughts occur during the game in regularity and engaging with them is one of the main ways you can go about answering the central question: who are you?

Politics plays a pretty central role in this. When you arrive in Martinaise it's embroiled in a political dispute. The local Dockworker's Union is in the middle of a strike, which has shut down the town economically, and physically, causing a major traffic jam in front of the city. The central dispute of the city is a negotiation between the Dockworker's Union and the Wild Pines Group. And on first blush you can see why.

The city of Martinaise is in disarray. It has been depoliced, defunded, deregulated. A communist revolution rose and overthrew their monarchy 50 years ago, to be quickly quashed by outside forces. And seemingly as punishment, Martinaise has be left to languish, the scars of that war pocking the city even half a decade later. Bullet holes scar the buildings, and giant artillery craters have been left in the town square. For all the moral righteousness touted by the MoralIntern who watch over the city, the eyes of the government have been turned blind to its material conditions.

It's not hard to see why a socialist movement would rise and strike under these conditions. If the Coalition (The foreign government that quashed the revolution) is going to demand they live under the laws of the MoralIntern (the international policing organization you are apparently a part of), but don't give them the tools to help build up their own society or fund their own government, why should the people Martinaise respect their rule? If the ultraliberals and their corporations are going to exploit their labor without granting enough money to fund the Martinaise economy while blocking all other means, why not demand their voices are heard? Every Worker a Member of the Board strikes very true to anyone who grew up memorizing the words "No Taxation without Representation." If you're going to make demands of material conditions people live with, it's not unreasonable that they ask for a seat at the table.

But siding with Dockworkers Union means working with Evrart Claire. Evrart Claire is a fascinating figure. A true believer in the socialist philosophy he has spread through his Union, but also an obsequious petit tyran, who seeks to install a socialist government in Martinaise, with himself at the top, naturally. Speaking with him is often an obtuse game of flattery and deception. It's impossible to pin down the unflappable Evrart Claire, because at any given time you can't know what his deal is. He seems to be lying, even when you know he's telling the truth. And you can't even know what person Evrart Claire.

You see, Evart Claire is actually two people. This can be easily missed through any play-through, but through some insight and key lines of dialogue you discover Evrart has an Identical Twin brother, Edgar; whose only tell is that Evrart has a lazy eye. And occassionally when visiting Evrart for another tête-à-tête where he dances around your questions, you'll notice his lazy is inexplicably gone. Evrart is so deceptive that you don't even know who you are talking to is Evrart at any time.

One of the major downfalls of the Soviet Union was the presence of party leaders, the petit tyran. These true believers who still insisted on carving out a fiefdom of their own in the socialist hegemony. Socialism, for all of its great solutions to what are major problems, is still vulnerable to this kind of corruption. There will always be Evrart Claires. Opportunists who see the wind changing, and have the right mixture of intelligence and charismatic slipperiness to carve out a section of the new world for themselves. Even if this is all genuinely believed, that Evrart believes the socialist government will make Martinaise better, he and Edgar are still looking to position themselves as the pigs that are more equal.

But the other side of the dispute is in many ways and degrees worse. Joyce Messier is the negotiator for Wild Pines, and at first blush she seems far better to deal with than Evrart or his brother. She's direct but affable and charming. You can waste hours waxing philosophy with her, and she will pleasantly indulge in your eccentricities. But behind her smile and wit is the soul of a viper, whose poison has infected the city. Outside the gate where the strike is occurring is a group of nonunion workers. Scabs. What isn't immediately apparent is they didn't come to Martinaise organically. They were planted there by Joyce.

The leader of the Scabs is part of a paramilitary group, a violent organization whom the body of the hanged man you came here to look at was a part of. His death, and many of the troubles currently in Martinaise is stained into her hands. She will not cooperate with you unless you help her with her with an unrelated case, and even then, she's quick to distance her moral obligation to her own actions. Joyce is part of the upper crust. She's the 1%, and she benefits for the system of exploitation that has left Revechol (and Martinaise in particular) in ruins. And she is willing to do anything, including putting the population in grave danger just to protect her position.

For all of her charm, for all of her pleasant conversation and philosophy, she is part of the engine destroying the world. Evrart is a weasel, but at least his ambitions might help Martinaise. Joyce doesn't care. And she'll burn Martinaise if she has to.

You can side with either of these people, but part of the argument is the actual character of them. Evrart isn't just a socialist with some corruption, he's a symbol of the specific pitfalls that exist within socialist organization. Joyce is not just a ruthless capitalist; she is a symbol of lengths capitalism will go to protect itself. The characters exist in the game not just as fully fleshed people, but microcosm existing as arguments about philosophy.

Other philosophies have presence in the game, though not as prominently in the main conflict of Martinaise. I haven't talked a lot about fascism because, while part of the games world, the handful of fascists aren't really that critical to the plot. You have a Cryptofascist who like other cryptofascists doesn't have a lot of central beliefs but is just resentful that he can't make racist jokes anymore, and otherwise just comes off as a spineless weasel. There is a race realist who is a trucker, you can satisfactorily tell to fuck off, though that will have consequences when you try to question him later.

 Then there's René Amoux. You find René with his friend Gaston, a similarly older man who plays a funny foil to the René's severe demeanor. René is in the twilight of his life. He is a former loyalist and soldier for Frissell, the last of the royal line, the former king of Revechol before he was deposed by the communists in the Antecentennial Revolution. René is a bitter old fascist, longing for the return of the royal times. He's a sad figure, one unable to let go of his own old beliefs in a time that has left him behind. He is left a ghost of a former man, forced to begrudgingly work with the Socialists for a living where he is put into an empty guard tower, looking over nothing important. Probing René won't just give you a good history of Martinaise and the Antecentennial Revolution from the perspective of a loyalist but gives you a good look into the bitter end of being a fascist. Not only are fascist beliefs disgusting, but At best you just get a lonely and sad man, imagining a gilded past that never existed.

It's a failure of fascism really baked into its solution. It looks at the problems of the world, and instead of trying to come up with solutions, fascism just wants to turn back the clock to a world in which these problems didn't exist. The problem is the problems of the modern day did exist in the past; it was just easier for the privileged class to ignore. The age before, the royal age of Revechol wasn't more stable that it is today. When you look into it the Kings were often corrupt, Fillipe the III who has a statue still standing was granted the Nickname Filippe the Squanderer, because his practice of opulent spending. By the time of the Antecentennial Revolution from the communards, the Revechol Monarchy was already a dying state. The fascists are wrong, this time wasn't better, or more stable. It was on life support and all the Revolution did was pull the plug. And that won't change no matter how many foreigners and promiscuous ladies the fascists blame.

And then there's the Moralista's. The Moralista's represent the dominant philosophy of the world Disco Elysium takes place in (if it's not clear by now, while Disco Elysium's world resembles our would, it is a wholly fictional world with its own history and powers). This world view, Moralism, is a humanist view. Often times focusing individual human strife than larger political systems. It's main group is Moralist International (MoralIntern), but their philosophy is felt throughout the structures of the world. They are aligned heavily with the dominant government, The Coalition, the international government who came in 50 years ago and put a stop to the communist Antecentennial Revolution. They are the ruling force of not just Revechol, but a lot of the world. The MoralIntern even put together the Revechol Citizen Militia (RCM), the organization you and your partner work for. The Moralists, unlike all other factions, have a representative who isn't just someone you interview in the case and can be swayed by. Their representative is with you all the time. Your Partner Kim Kitsuragi.

I've mentioned Kim a few times up to now, but largely have avoided talking about him. Kim is the person aside yourself you get to know the most in the game. Largely his is a consummate professional. An efficient police officer assigned to the same case you're in. He's professional without being unkind. He's smart without being obnoxious. He has beliefs which can be seen with his behavior, but he doesn't like sharing them. He plays the perfect straight man to your strange antics. And as a representative for moralism, he's perfect. Kim is effortlessly likable. He has little moments of real character, such as the one cigarette a day he allows himself while going over case notes, or the fact that his police radio as a setting speed rock, which he is initially embarrassed about when you discover it. In a quiet scene toward the middle of the game, while you wait for the tide to go down, you can whistle a Disco tune and if you succeed Kim joins so it's just you and Kim sitting in a swing set whistling the night away. It's a great moment of friendship. And as his friend his philosophy is appealing.

The problem is that Moralism is too centrist to actually change the world. Moralism just really stitches the broken parts together. At some point the Kingdom of Consciousness Thought Cabinet will come to mind to you character. And the game treats this a big thing. You are one of the few people who see the political philosophies and have concluded that they are flawed. You're the perfect Moralist, you smarty boi. The blurb for it is equally enticing.

Heartache is powerful, but democracy is *subtle*. Incrementally, you begin to notice a change in the weather. When it snows, the flakes are softer when they stick to your worry-worn forehead. When it rains, the rain is warmer. Democracy is coming to the Administrative Region. The ideals of Dolorian humanism are reinstating themselves. How can they not? These are the ideals of the Coalition and the Moralist International. Those guys are signal blue. And they're not only good -- they're also powerful. What will it be like, once their nuanced plans have been realized?

The Kingdom of Consciousness

The thing is: it's right, Moralism is the domanant philosophy of the world here. Not only held by the MoralIntern, but The Coalition. But Martinaise is still in ruin. It's not repaired, it doesn't have it's own government. It doesn't even have its own branch of the RCM, it's looked over by two branches, the 41st from neighboring city Jamrock, where your character is from, and the 57th, Kim's district. The initial tension between you and Kim is you are part of a joint investigation because the 57th and 41st both claim jurisdiction over the area. But notably Martinaise doesn't have jurisdiction of their own. It's almost forgotten about, the only form of policing is done by a Vigilante arm of the Dockworkers Union, the Hardie Boys, whom are your first major suspects to the Hanged Man crime. For all the bluster of Moralism making a more righteous world through incrementalism, the evidence of the world we see is, a lot of it is still worse off. When you finish the Kingdom of the Consciousness and internalize the philosophy of Moralism, you're left with this blurb:

The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.

The Kingdom of the Consciousness.

The Moralist Centrist philosophy isn't going to make the world better. It's wallpaper. It looks at the flaws of the world and then to humanity, and says: “it's you. You're the problem. You are responsible for the mess the world is in. Never mind we never gave you the tools, that you're left policing yourself but if you go too far we'll send people from outside the city to arrest you. No you just have to be better, more humanist. Never mind we're an occupying force. You're the problem.”

The problem with centrism is it can't fix any major issues, incrementally or otherwise. Centrists can agree corruption is bad, and murder is bad. But to them these are individual problems. Faults in people. The system the system is mainly good. It just has some kinks. It's unable to conceive of the idea that maybe why corrupt people keep getting into power, or why a vigilante group be in charge of Martinaise, is a systemic problem. A fault in the system itself.

All of these philosophies can be held be held by your detective. All of them with similar puzzling and musings. You can be a fascist, but it only turns you into a bitter drunk. You can be an ultraliberal capitalist, but you become a zealot for the system exploiting the decay, but hey at least you can buy books. You can become a centrist, consigned to the status quo that is killing this world. Or you can become a communist, but that just makes you sad.

Most notably, for all of these philosophies, there isn't a Disco Option. There isn't an option where everybody loses themselves in music and mutual love for mankind and these problems go away. There isn't a third option compromise where the Union gets better pay and the Coalition agrees to help rebuild the town because you're just that good of a negotiator. In games like the Outer Worlds there's always a third option, one that solves the problems and makes everyone happy. Disco Elysium calls this design philosophy out. There isn't a Disco Option. You can side with the Dockworkers or the company or your organization. Which way western man? Even if you choose to stay out of it, it's still a choice with positives and negatives.

In a way this game felt like it was calling me out when I played it. I'm an agreeable person in my life, which you wouldn't guess from my mostly comedy Twitter Profile. In person I'm always wanting everyone to be happy. So much of my life I've attempted to go with the Disco Option, hoping the world would get better. It never does. As a leftist I look at the world with all of its flaws, and I see the flaws in the solutions. I stand as a very vocal Anticapitalist, but even then I want a third option. One where we sail into a better and more just world. I want a Disco Option and Disco Elysium laughs at me for considering it. The truth is, there isn't one. Only compromises you're willing to settle for.

A lot of discussion has been made about these choices. Arguing that it pulls its punches. That because it doesn't present any solution as an unalloyed good, that it can't actually be revolutionary. And I disagree with this. I disagree with this because of the lack of a Disco Option. The game very much wants you to consider that the world is not filled with perfect solutions. Only tradeoffs. It wants you to consider that none of these philosophies are perfect. The fascists are bitter, the Capitalists are willing destroyers of the world, the Moralists are intellectual cowards, and the communists are just sad. Moreover, Disco Elysium isn't about what philosophy will save the world. It's about what philosophy says about you. So when people accuse it pulling it's punches, I have to wonder whether they are engaging with the game in the way it demands you to. I have to wonder if they want to believe that they hold the Disco Option.

 Philosophy is a major part of the game; I've spent the last 20 paragraphs talking about just this. But political philosophy won't make you happy. It won't make you a better person. At best you'll make the perfect model of how fucked up the world is, and that doesn't make you less sad. Even becoming a communist doesn't give you a sense of community. For their socialist rhetoric the Dockworkers Union are often closer to social democrats. In the most realistic choice of the game if you choose to become a communist and meet the only other communist in the game, he calls you a liberal and a pedophile.

So why hold any of these beliefs? For the same reason we hold any belief: Because we're human and we compulsively are trying to make sense of the world around us. Disco Elysium isn’t about the viability of any of these ideas. Disco Elysium is about who you are. And beliefs shapes as much of that as your experiences.

Or maybe experience isn’t who you are. This is also an important discussion in the game. Throughout the game what you have done is an important point that keeps cropping up. You rolled up in Martinaise 3 days before the start of the game, and in that time instead of doing your job, you spent it in a drug and alcohol stupor. And the only testimony you can get on your actions are from other people. Occasionally you’ll be in the world, working on a mystery, and somebody will say something like: “Hey, I recognize you, you’re Tequila Sunset.” And you’re like “Tequila What-now?” Then they’ll regale about the time you crashed your motor carriage into the canal after crashing through a billboard and jumping the bridge, only to emerge stupid drunk to announce that you are TEQUILA SUNSET! 

It’s a scene familiar to anyone who has ever binge drunk at some point in their lives. I know there have been point in my life, dark points, in which I would get a call, or a text message, from a friend or a family member detailing events of the night before that for the life of me, I can never remember happening. It’s a strange sensation, really. Hearing about things done by someone who has your body, your voice, your specific intonations, but is otherwise alien to you. Like some sort of sloppy invasion of the body snatchers, where their entire goal is seemingly to do embarrassing things, you have to apologize for and clean up later. When this happens you have two options, either have a moment of serious self-reflection of your choices or grab another drink. In parts of my life, I chose the latter.

And this decision is also a part of the game. Drinking, Drugs, and Cigarettes are a mechanic that can give you minor bonuses. Cigarettes help you focus on Intellectual tasks at the expense of your health. Booze helps with physical tasks, but hurts your morale, a reflection of slipping back into the stupor you escaped at the beginning of the game. You can choose to use these tools for +1 on given checks. All you have to do is slip further into the behavior that lost your memory in the first place.

In a way, this review acts as a companion to my last review, on Cyberpunk 2077. In there I called that game "All spectacle, but very little substance." Well, if that's Cyberpunk, than Disco Elysium is all substance. It has beautiful visuals of course, with an hauntingly beautiful impressionist oil painting aesthetic that helps drive through the mood of the game. But Disco Elysium has a vision it has questions that it puts in a lot of work to discuss. There is a voice to the game. While I engaged with both of these pieces as deeply personal works, in which the discussion was who your character is, it was much more seamless and effortless in Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium had a lot to say, and there is still more I haven't heard. And I think I will be going back to Martinaise sooner than later. Because I certainly enjoyed talking with it.

Thoughts from Night City: A look at Cyberpunk 2077

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment Night City gripped my shoulders and pulled me into it like a lovers embrace. Perhaps it was climbing into a Bladerunner style Corpo Vehicle as it lifted to show Night Cities breathtaking Vistas. Maybe it was in the middle of the parade, as V held out her hand and a holographic cherryblossom passed through it. Maybe it was in the middle of a drag race with my transgendered bartender as we veered off road to catch the accidental killer of her husband.

But once I was gripped, it was impossible for me to escape.

Cyberpunk 2077, released in late 2020, is a beautiful adaptation of… Cyberpunk, the 1988 Cyberpunk Tabletop Roleplaying game. Of course, Cyberpunk itself was adapted from, every cyberpunk novel in existence, a fact that while allowed nerds of all shapes to relive their favorite movies, games, and tv shows, it also disallowed Cyberpunk of having anything of its own to say. It's funny because the game based off the Medium that usually has so much to say is often silent behind stat blocks that tell you just how much hardware you can buy before your character goes cyberpsycho.

Cyberpunk 2077 often inherits the thrill of being an Edgerunner under the dystopian skies, while also inheriting Cyberpunk's many flaws. Firstly, it is very derivative. The main story itself is Altered Carbon by way of Johnny Mnemonic, it even casts Keanu Reeves.

You play V, a former Corporate Stooge slash Streetkid Punk slash Nomad of the Bad Lands who after a series of events finds themselves back on the streets with nobody but their best choomba, Jackie trying to make themselves a Legend of Night City, just like Johnny Silverhand--Why is that monkey paw closing?

It's here that you get to know the character of Night City, and it's the Character of a hundred cyberpunk novels, amalgamated together in a fully realized and beautiful monstrosity. But I do mean it's beautiful. As an avid cyberpunk fan (genre, not specifically the game) I recognize my favorite books in the twists and turns of the city. I see Blade Runner in its towers and neon lights, I see Robocop in its crass and over-the-top advertising on every corner, I see Deus Ex in its rotten streets and corrupt Corporations. I also see how well it all came together.

It's here you find your V, embroiled in her own mission, side to side with her best Choomba, to become fucking legends of Night City, when you're contracted by a Night City boss and a cyber prostitute to find a relic, an experimental datashard. Going through this I couldn't help but be reminded of the Shadowrun instructions to on how to set up a run. The Johnson (the guy who contracts you with the Run), the Job (What the run is supposed to accomplish), the Plan (How you plan to accomplish it), and the Hitch (The unexpected thing that goes wrong in the midst of the job). This formula is beat by beat matched in this opening job, mixed with high octane action.

 It's an incredible mission. Set up like a classic heist gone wrong, with excellent set pieces, such as sliding down Arasaka Tower, or flying down the streets of Night City as you're being chased by security forces. And it ends with you in the back of a cab, talking to your best friend, your choomba. And he succumbs to his wounds. My last words to him, was "See ya at the top, Jackie" which is so fucking corny, but it works. That's your relationship to the man. Throughout the prologue you two have been complete idiots for the mercenary life. Best friends who just wanted to see the world from its highest places so you could piss off of its edge;  now, only one of you walks away from a botched job. So you say the only thing you can in this situation: See you at the top, buddy.

It's from here, a series of events leads you shot, body dumped in the dump, somehow surviving with the aid of an unexpected ally, but also the knife twists. After being taken to Vik, the ripper doctor, the relic you had placed in your head is killing you, you are dying, and the construct of Night City terrorist, Johnny Silverhand awakens in your mind. And from here on you have a hitchhiker, to appear and comment on your missions. But I'll cover Johnny later.

And after that extended prologue, Night City finally opens up to you. And what a city. Night City feels like a City. One both living and breathing, and also uncaring, omnipotent. It's winding streets, decaying villas, all of it breaths a life that's hard to capture in text. I have lived in or around a city my entire life, and never before have I been in a game that captures what it's like. In Grand Theft Auto, if I want to get from point A to B, all I need to do is turn my car and point. In Cyberpunk, I had to navigate. It has dimension. It feels like a fully realized city that grew upward. So that some of it's neighborhoods tower over others. It has a downtown, a market district, it has slums, and all of them meld together lacking any sense of being constructed, but rather grown from the ground up. It's character ends up being the star character of the game, which may be good because of the actual main character: V.

A lot of criticism has been lobbed at Cyberpunk 2077 over the last year and some change, much of which has been directed at V. Not all unwarranted. Some of this I suspect is because a lot of people's V were male, and no offense to Gavin Drea, his V is just not as compelling or emotive as the top notch performance of Cherami Leigh. Much of Drea's dialogue comes off as transactional, meant to just move the plot along, or honestly just flat. Which is a problem female Vs just don't have. Cherami Leigh brings so much character to her performance, she ends up outshining much of the colorful cast. She comes off playful when making fun of her friends, mercurial when attempting to extract information, and vulnerable when talking about herself. This may be the main reason to select a female V, a found a lot of problems smoothed over by her performance.

But other issues with V can’t be addressed by the raspy charm of Cherami Leigh. Mostly having to do with the roleplaying aspects of this roleplaying game. The dialogue options are very limited, granting only a few responses. That being Suspicious V, Mercurial V, Nice V, and [Insert Background Here]. This can often feel restraining, the option you would pick are sometimes (or even often) not present, and sometimes you can get caught offguard with what your V says. This can be addressed in the same way you could address problems with Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption 2 or more appropriately, Geralt Rivera from the Witcher. That V is no wholly your character, she has a personality of her own. And that I would mostly agree. Unfortunately, Cyberpunk doesn't seem to be under that impression.

A lot of V is customization. Her background, how she dresses, whether or not she has a long uncut girldick. The game wants to signal to you that this is your V, and in many ways it is. I can't imagine another V than mine, even though I know that within limits, there are other Vs on the same disc. But that phrase: within limits, that is the operant word. Your V has limits to who they can be. Your V will always be a runner. Your V will always have a hard life, your V will always do that sick as hell montage, your V will always want to become a Legend with Jackie. A lot of your V will be found not in the dialogue, but in the inferences.

What you choose to do, what you choose not to do, what quests you take. That is what makes your V.

I decided to lean as heavily into the derivative nature of Cyberpunk and made a Molly Millions style build. Clever, though not incredibly bright; Ruthless, but with a Devil May Care attitude that brings out the better in others; prone to breaking face, as well as hearts. It was in character creation that I ran into the first hurdle. Her eyes. There was no way for me to replicate the classic mirror eyes of Molly Millions. This struck me as odd. As much as the game pilfered from classic Cyberpunk, it didn't allow me the ability to stylize after, debatably, it's most iconic side character. This is a running problem with Cyberpunk. It is lousy with options, but hardly any of them are ones you want.

Most of the options are your standard looter shooter affair. Options that make an abstract number go up. And while I'm sure this is exciting to the enthusiastic mathematicians, very few of the options make the game more fun to play. Some of them do, but they are lost in the noise of color-coded guns, cybertech, and a byzantine perk point system. And while some might say this is "variety", Variety is meaningless if it doesn't change anything.

Now the things that do work, work well. Ways to slow down time, a rocket leap, motherfucking blades that come out of your arms. These work and improve the game. Unfortunately the buy in for these abilities means you're slogging through several Gigs, which themselves can be fun Far Cry style outposts, but in aggregate can become wearing,  in order to even afford or unlock upgrades. Meaning the most fun you can have in the game comes either right at the end where you can hardly use all the fun stuff, or after you've done so much side content you've become near sick of the game. Cash balance is a particular problem in this game, as the ability to unlock cars becomes staggering at some point.

Cars are a particularly thorny subjects because driving in Night City is abysmal. It might be because I play most games with keyboard and mouse that the driving became such a chore through an otherwise gorgeous city, but the twitchy and jittery controls made driving segments, bar a couple of vehicles, impossible for me. The weird part is: Jackie's Motorbike, and the Beast both handle, at the very least: fine. So this wasn't a problem that was insurmountable, it's just every other vehicle felt like it was on ice. I rarely went anywhere when I wasn't on bike. Or I just fast traveled. I honestly don't think it speaks well about your game that, despite its beautify and masterwork design, so many people will forgo navigation to teleport by way of loading screen.

It's tempting at this point to say that Cyberpunk 2077 is as wide as the ocean but deep as a puddle, and there are parts of the game that is certainly true. Pacifica, for instance, is one of the most conceptually fascinating parts of the game.  A casino, carnival, and mall packed by the ocean side, that lost money, or traffic, or whatever, and was abandoned; leaving the neighborhood in the ruins of these monuments to unchecked capitalism. Now populated by a Haitian group known as the Voodoo Boys. All of this could have made for a real, breathing area. But it's there for one story mission and like three side jobs, mostly gigs, and then you just leave. There's not a lot there to do, not many locals you can talking to, which makes the segments you spend there and the choices you can make kind of ring hollow:  choose to help the Voodoo Boys, Betray them, Storm Out after the mission, offer to buy them a beer, it doesn't matter. Because you'll never go back.

So it's tempting to call it shallow, but there are times in Cyberpunk 2077 that have surprising depth, that if you're not careful the undercurrent will grip you and pull you under faster than you can think.

Panam's Quest is an example of one of the top tier this game has to offer, and is some of the best video game content I've ever played. We start out meeting up with Panam, fixing a junker she's been driving when her partner screwed her over and stole her ride and her load. And what followed was completely unexpected. It was the story of a nomad, who came to Night City seeking freedom, but found a heartless town that either consumed or your soul. After having spent hours in Night City, having lost my only friend, I related to this, hard. I too lived in Night City and found it often soul crushing, the cold towers jutting from the concrete jungle only serving to remind me that I was alone. It was here Panam showed me another way. Her journey was about making peace with her family and finding freedom on the road. It was after a few interactions, when V and Panam hacked Power Terminals to overload the junctions to knock a sky carrier to the ground V made a realization: She was falling in love.

(Full discretion: I was not playing a fully vanilla version of Cyberpunk. The one mod I had was the ability to Romance Pam as a female V. The primary reason being, I did not want the best love interest in the game locked behind a substandard vocal performance.)

Now, up until this point, after the Death of Jackie, I had been playing V as increasingly erratic. Prone to go off the handle, short to temper, shorter with people's lives. V would drink whenever V could (and a lot at that), V would tell Johnny to fuck off every time he opened his stupid fucking mouth, and V will kill quickly and mercilessly. But that changed after she met Panam. Sure, V had romantic encounters before. A brief fling with River before breaking it off gently because she did not feel the same way about River as he did her. Another with Judy after a SCUBA trip. That wasn't so clean of a break. But nobody left V quite the impression as Panam. Maybe it was her balls to the wall method of heists, maybe it was the cool military hardware, maybe it was just her sheer gumption and attitude. My V was helpless.

Other content was similarly absorbing. Judy's Quest to find out what happened to her girlfriend, the cyber prostitute who disappeared after the first act is both gripping in concept and in execution. Kind of a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo investigative noir, that ends brutally and tragically. It's beautiful and dire, as Judy and V are the only ones to survive at the end. This leads to a conversation in a darkly lit bathroom after a SCUBA adventure that just rips your heart out, when you realize: there was nothing you could have done. Cyber Prostitution and Human Smuggling is a big business in Night City. And the Clouds was among the biggest. And you don't take on Titans and just walk away after that. There are consequences. But that night you had each other.

Not being able to do a lot about outcomes is a common criticism of Cyberpunk 2077. People who have done multiple playthroughs have gotten a peak behind the artifice and saw how the game narrowly guides you these conclusions became disillusioned. In so much of the games content the players choices don't matter outside of maybe a character is alive later, or you can call them for the final mission.

A better example maybe is Peralaz missions. The Peralaz missions are great on the surface of them, led by two awesome side characters the Mayor Jefferson Peralaz and his wife, Elizabeth, as you uncover a conspiracy. They are being spied on, and they hire V as a contractor to feel out what is going on. Through twists and turns, you find: it's not that they are being spied on. But controlled. Their minds are being tampered with, memories, tastes, feelings. They're being overwritten by a shadowy force that Johnny seems to think is an AI. After this, you have a choice: Do you tell the Mayor? You see, in an interesting twist, Elizabeth has known about this for a while. She has been part of the coverup. It's not her fault really. She discovered the inconsistencies on her own and when she began to poke around to this end she was on the wrong end of a whole lot of bad. To keep her family safe she kept quiet. And she asks you to do the same.

And at face value, this mission is incredible. A genuine Sci Fi mystery that takes advantage of it's setting to truly horrifying ends. But none of your decisions or competency matters here. Do you catch the spies? If you don't Elizabeth will tell you anyway. Do you tell Jefferson? Either way they block you and you no longer can interact with them. From here a lot of people saw this as another example of the game taking power from the player, and interfering with the ability to make meaningful choices.

To this end a good argument can be made that the only meaningful choices you make is at the beginning and at the very end. But, this leads me to two questions: First: Is it important for a character to impact the world in a story? And Second: What do you mean by 'meaningful'?

To the first, personally I never minded the artifice, because impacting the world of Cyberpunk conflicts with its premise. The world of Cyberpunk can't change. Nothing will ever change this world because it is too far gone, corporations have too much power. Johnny nuked Arasaka tower 50 years ago, but there it still stands now. Do you honestly think a small conversation is ever going to change something in this uncaring city? You might have minor impacts, but as a whole, the world doesn't react to you, because it doesn't care. This is what makes Cyberpunk… cyberpunk. These are noir dystopias. The point is to live in them, not change them.

And the second point also brings a weird expectation to me, because to me, the choices I made were meaningful. They didn't change the story, but they changed what I thought about V. So much of Cyberpunk 2077 is in inference. What missions did you choose to take? If you thought you were on borrowed time what would be meaningful for your to do? Did you go to Jackie's Funeral? Did you speak? What item did you put on his Offrenda? Mechanically these choices don't matter. But didn't they matter to you? So much of what I found meaningful were choices like what to put on the offrenda? do I make Misty feel part of the family? How do you treat Johnny?

Johnny is a peculiar character. You meet him right after first heist and your first impression is not good. He wakes up, demanding a cigarette then threatens your life, beating your head in on the windowsill of your apartment. But when things get deeper, and tensions cool down, you scratch the surface to find… an amazing asshole. He's manipulative, egocentric, has an outsized view of his own self-importance, and a nasty habit of getting people to trust him before he screws them over. He's a bigger-than-life asshole who uses his natural charisma to consume others. A lot is said about Keanu Reeves' performance, that it was lackluster or phoned in, but, and not to be insulting to our modern Jesus, but this is on par with Keanu Reeve's performance in other cyberpunk titles.

He shows up, chews the scenery, acts like a jackass at every opportunity… and yeah, that's cyberpunk Keanu Reeves. It might be difficult to remember in a post John Wick world, but a mixture of subdued acting combined with wild moments of scenery chewing was Keanu Reeves' thing for decades. It was a joke for a long time. And it's kind of nice to see him back at it. Time enough has passed where this seems to be a distinctive style and one, combined with Keanu's very presence, adds a layer of legitimacy to the cyberpunk scenery. Keanu Reeves has been part of cyberpunk since forever. Not even getting into the Matrix: there's Johnny Mnemonic and a Scanner Darkly. He is recognizably cyberpunk. And Johhny being recognizably Keanu Reeves helps sell Johnny to the player.

I'm not the first to recognize that that celebrity appearances in video games are generally lackluster. It's honestly usually distracting, playing a game and suddenly BAM Kevin Spacey and thanks to modern rotoscope technology he is on my Call of Duty in all his Kevin Spacey glory, but in Cyberpunk 2077 this it actually fucking works. That moment of recognition, where you go "That's Keanu Goddamn Reeves" has to be similar to the moment V looks up and to see the abusive asshole and thing "Is that Johnny Silverhand?"

If it had only been this, CD Projekt Red would have done their job. But on top of this they managed to make Johnny a compelling character. Johnny is undeniably a massive asshole. Manipulative and often abusive. But there is a dimension to him. He's a burnout. A man who built a legacy fighting against what he saw as an evil, and what noone else would even recognize. This consumed him, fueling a narrowminded obsession with taking down Arasaka. And he finally does something big. Two thermonuclear charges right at the building. It costs him his life, but it also cost him more. He was trapped by Arasaka, put on a datashard to be tortured for his crimes. And we he emerges, stuck in the head of some punk runner 50 years later, the tower still fucking stands. Like a giant middle finger piercing the sky directed at him. His legacy was an unmarked grave in a dump.

It would have been so easy to take this complicated backstory and make it the reason he's such an asshole. But they don't. He was always an asshole. The question is can you, can V, make him into something more? For all his flaws and they are many, Johnny has a charm that is undeniable. And In that way he is a lot like Cyberpunk 2077.

The game is flawed. Broken in places. And I'm not talking about bugs. By now with the 1.5 patch, most of the bugs are smoothed over. Not nearly all of them. I had several in my play through, characters popping in and out of the universe, dialogue audio not playing during key story moments, vehicles appearing in midair, the game is still a buggy mess. And only a couple times did it force me to reload or at worst, revert a save. No, mainly the problems run deeper. 

I mentioned 17 paragraphs ago about Pacifica, on how conceptually interesting it was as it was empty. And it’s upsetting how much of the game is actually like this. CD Projekt Red has a built a beautiful city that is quite easy to get lost in. But all it takes is a little closer examination and you’re flung back to your chair where you are no longer elite mercenary on the streets of Night City but an out of shape nerd vying for a crumb of escapism. Fire your gun in public and watch everyone crouch simultaneously like flash mob dancer choreography. Use your detectovision and find out the majority of people are just “citizen npc” this is a stark contrast to games like Watch_dogs, which put a lot of effort in giving small blurbs.

 This is also a problem in the amount of things there are to do in Night City. With the exception of couple side missions, your only interactions with the city itself is gigs. These inorganic things you get when a guy you’ve never met calls you out of the blue to tell you that a couple blocks away is something they’d like you to steal, or kill, or rescue, or all of the above. The thing is these missions are often quite good but because you’re only made aware of them if you’re already a block away, and you rarely get a chance to have a meaningful interaction outside of these weird phone calls to the fixers of the job, means they come off as artificial. “Why am I getting these gigs?” Well because you were in the neighborhood, I guess.

This artificiality is also a problem with a lot of the side missions. They appear on your map, marked as a place for you to check out. The people involved presumably being frozen in place until player 1 decides they’re going to intervene with one liners and a black trench coat.

 The problem is, once you notice this artifice, it’s hard not to notice it, and it takes a good deal of ignoring it to get lost again.

Another form of this artifice can be seen in the romance side plots. All of them follow the same exact beats. You get to know them as part of a job, you work as their partner, they reveal that they want some sweet sweet revenge, you have the option to either help them, or talk them down, then you have a date side mission that involves some sort of neural interfacing, you get the option to kiss them, and then after doing the dirty they have a long chat with you on what all that meant.

All of these are well written and nice, but once you notice that this pattern it’s hard not to think about it.

So why, after all of this, and far more criticisms that can be had about 2077, how did I still get lost in it? And to me, it is the rare example on how spectacle can actually make an experience. 2077 is almost all spectacle, but goddamn what a spectacle. It manages to hit just right in just the right times that I found myself effortlessly wallpapering its flaws as I went through.

Why is V doing a bunch of gigs when her life is about to end? Well, she wanted to make good on her promise to Jackie I reasoned. Why do most of these people not have names? They’re just the faceless crowd to me. Why do the police watch me run for two blocks before giving up? Corruption and laziness. They were thin excuses, but goddamn the spectacle made me want to believe them. The spectacle made me want to live in Night City for the time I was there.

So live I did. I got an apartment in the Glens, had a favorite ramen shop in the Cherry Blossom markets that sold packaged ramen to its customers. I went home every night, took off my running gear, took a shower, and called my girlfriend. I ate and drank and had coffee every morning. And on hard days, I’d call Jackie and leave him a message telling him I missed him.

When the final act came and I got the incredibly immersion breaking prompt screen that this would be my last chance, I tied up all loose ends. I went to my favorite Ramen Shop, I went to the afterlife and ordered 2 Jackie Welles (A shot of Vodka on the rocks, with lime juice, ginger beer… oh and most importantly — a splash of love), then went home, did my nightly routine, and called Jackie one last time.

Living in Night City wasn't easy. It took effort, but once I did it, it was total. And that night looking out of my window to the city as I drank my Jackie Welles. I knew I'd miss this city.

The endings of the game is both a source of praise and criticism. The criticism comes not, I think from the endings themselves, which for the record are all great, if a varying level of satisfying; but rather that the only meaningful story choices happen here. Whether you call your girlfriend, what pills you take, if your bromance meter with Johnny is filled up by now, these are the choices that matter in the end.

Cyberpunk boasts a respectable 7 endings depending on if you storm the place with Alderados, or knock down the front door with Johnny's gang, or accept help from the sister of the head of Asaka herself, with a secret ending where you and Johnny run a solo mission kicking down the door guns blazing. You can even choose to end it all right there. Take the gun, and no one else gets hurt. There are also endings depending on whether you say "fuck it" and just let Johnny take the body.

The issue is that you don't have a lot of power beyond these ending choices for the overall direction of the story: but I've already argued that's largely the point. There was never going to be the ending Where V an Johnny team up to take down the corrupt power structures of this world. V and Johnny might be legends, but the corporations live on. They always live on. Arasaka tower took two thermonuclear bombs, but here it is, still standing 50 years later. There is no changing the world in Cyberpunk stories, but rather, the story is always going to be a bittersweet character journey. And to me, Cyberpunk delivered.

A lot of people have said the most satisfying journey was the Nomad-to-Nomad arch, and I have to admit that it does have a satisfying full circle journey. But for my money, the Corpo to Nomad arc is just as satisfying. My V had started her journey high on the corporate ladder, and was knocked from grace by company politics, then after trying the mercenary life, toward the end of it, it all became tiring. Night City is complex place, as uncaring as it is corrupting. And for all of its beautiful Vistas and flashy neon is plaster to sure up the cracks. Night City is in decay, and if you let it the decay sets in you as well. Given 6 months to live, my V decided that the open road, the world away from Night City was the life for her. In Night City all she had were broken dreams and lost friends. The Nomads gave her something more: a home.

My time in Night City was meaningful, to me. The little interactions, the moments of connection. The small moments where I simply lived in its sprawling decay will stick to my memory. The question of how much of that experience was because of the game, and how much was what I added to it comes to mind, but honestly? What's the difference? That was what I took away, that's mine. And so was my choice to leave.

And like V, I don't think I will be returning to Night City. The spectacle of the city, it's architecture, it lives with me now, the memories of the time I lived there will live on. But my V's story is done and continuing in its streets feels wrong to me somehow. In the end, I have a lot to say about Cyberpunk 2077, and not all positive. My thoughts are complex, and the game is supremely flawed, but goddamn did it grip me. Perhaps the spectacle of it all is all I needed to fill in the cracks on my own. Or maybe it was the small moments of connection that got me. I'm just glad I lived there for a little while.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

A fun mess

In 1992 my parents took me to an Arcade at the edge of my of my town, Independence and Kansas City. There, amid the noise, flashing lights, and smell of stale pizza was the cabinet for a game of the likes I had never seen before. The joystick was already smeared with grease, the cabinet window a plastic sheaf with these concentric circle ridges that textured the screen; behind which lit up a gory rotoscoped blue ninja artfully (and with all the squishy detail), decapitating  identical  yellow ninja as 32 bit blood dripped down the oddly white spine and the words FATALITY flashing on the screen in a dripping red impact font.

It is impossible to separate Mortal Kombat (2021) from being a young kid in the 90s standing on cheap green short strand carpet, shoving quarters into a simulated murder machine, and trying to find the exact pattern and pace of movements and jumps that made the screen go black and your character perform unspeakable acts of violence on a palette swapped version of himself. Luckily Mortal Kombat evokes that feeling strong enough to carry it through its 84 minute run time.

The story, such as it is, follows an ostensibly original character, Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan, a down on his luck MMA fighter and family man, whom after an assassination attempt from a masked man in a blue samurai suit who can control ice, Cole is brought into a small team hunting for people with a peculiar birthmark the Cole happens to possess. And from there they go on an Odyssey to locate the Temple of Raiden, an ancient Storm God, where hopefully they will finally find the point of the movie.

This is the speed for about a full half of the run time. Starting off as a Kurisawa-esque Samurai revenge story for the first 10 minutes to set up a lineage for the story, then pivoting into a kind of Rocky/Rudy sports story about a fighter down on his luck, and then wheeling around into a conspiracy Lore thriller ala Skull Island until finally settling down into a Superhero team up movie, all while interspersed with shorts scenes of Ng Chin Han gloriously chewing the poorly rendered CGI scenery.

It seems that Mortal Kombat wanted to be 5 different movies, when honestly it could have settled on being one: Blood Sport. Just remake Blood Sport, but this time have Sonya Blade doing kickflips and the people already sold on the idea from word Mortal are going to watch it. In the way Warner Brothers made this movie, they come perilously close to having to expose an unwilling audience Mortal Kombat's lore, a mind-numbingly over convoluted mess of barely distinguishable realms and splits timelines that come from needing a narrative justification of why the big dude in the skull face keeps coming back when I killed his ass three games ago.

Despite the seeming overstuffing of the plot structure, and the over tuned structural editing of the piece, there is still long stretches of the movie in which not much is actually happening and we're left relying on the strength of the characters to carry us through it, something Mortal Kombat struggles with because the original characters were little more than two dimensional sprites swapped between three body models, and the fact that our protagonist is just boring doesn't actually help matters. His story, which plays out like The Matrix by way of Highlander, just can't capture my attention long enough to carry me through the story. His plot beats are predictable and lazy, as if the screen writer took Hero With A Thousand Faces, copy pasted the text into the script, and edited to include characters from a 30 year old violence simulator for over sugared minors.

Where the movie picks up is in its action scenes, which is just as gory and indulgent as the games that bear its name. If you're watching to see Subzero tear a man's arms off, or Kung Lao saw someone in half with his hat, you will not be disappointed. The director is also very conscientious on including as many references, catch phrases, and locations to make a lifelong fan boy squeal with glee. And credit to it, I did squeal with glee. But I have to just wonder what it must look like to a person who has never played Mortal Kombat to watch the guy in the funny hat turn to the camera and announce "Flawless Victory." In a poe faced seriousness and grandeur reserved for action trailers about a trained navy seal getting back his kidnapped dog.

Come to think of it, a lot of the movie is very grandiose. They take very seriously the inherent silliness of the premise, and this is something I respect from it. It knows what it is, but it isn't so insecure as to have to keep reminding me of exactly how silly it is that SubZero has ice powers from a magic birthmark. Rather it powers through it with the delivery of Brian Blessed performing a Shakespearean Sonnet. It is incredible in its absurdity, and where it leans into it is funnest parts of the movie.

Overall, I did enjoy Mortal Kombat, it is very much a movie for fans but likely no one else but fans. While it does drag in places where it expects you to be invested in characters and backstory and not just patiently waiting for Scorpion to finally show up again, where it delivers, it delivers well. It's well choreographed, most of the cast seem to be having a blast, and so did I.

7/10

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