The first rule of Cyberpunk 2077 is that nothing is fair, free, or totally illegal in Night City. You can catch a bullet for the crime of chewing your locust pizza too loudly, for intervening when an NCPD officer gives the local bum a shakedown, or for no reason at all if you're just that unlucky. It's a game where good people die bloody all the time and never see a lick of justice. What else do those gonks expect in a place like this?
Night City is teeming with, as Johnny puts it, "zapper dumples and filth." Now on my third playthrough, I've long viewed this proud, lawless dystopia as an unflinching mirror of its citizens, revealing humanity's deepest flaws and vestigial saving graces in the most confrontational way possible. In typical CD Projekt Red style, there's potential to be harnessed here – for better or worse – and it's all down to the choices you make. But while CDPR has revolutionized the open-world RPG twice in a decade, arguably turning replayability into an artform, I'd not considered one very specific reading: NC is full of bad people, but maybe the whole place is V's real enemy.
