Cyberpunk 2077 channels 1997’s Blade Runner adventure game

The Cyberpunk 2077 demo still had another half-hour left, but I already knew I wanted this game. I was busy writing during the Xbox media briefing prior to the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last week, so I didn’t catch the trailer for developer CD Projekt Red’s retro-futuristic followup to the The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt before my appointment to see the game for myself. And while I didn’t need to witness much more than the title screen, a bit of hacking, and a few cybernetic body mods to fall under its spell, it was the demo’s least dramatic scene and the one most reminiscent of the 1997 point-and-click Blade Runner game from developer Westwood Studios that made me desperate to jump into its world.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person mashup of genres that all work together to enable you to approach missions however you want. You take those missions as a mercenary named V, who is one of the millions of people struggling to get by in Cyberpunk’s hellish future where corporations have filled in the gap left by a weak central government. In a tweet following the trailer at the Xbox briefing, Neuromancer author William Gibson said it looks like Grand Theft Auto with a retro-future aesthetic. And it is that, but from the hands-off demo I saw, it is also so much more.