Triple Click - Cyberpunk 2077, Three Years Later

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Three years after it first came out, Cyberpunk 2077 is finally finished. Kirk, Maddy, and Jason revisit CD Projekt Red's much-hyped game, which has changed quite a bit thanks to a brand new patch and the Phantom Liberty expansion. They talk story, gameplay, racism, and much more.One More Thing:Kirk: Lies of PMaddy: CocoonJason: Assassin’s Creed MirageLINKS:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Soapunk net runners often submerge themselves in a tub of ice cubes to keep their implants from overheating. And I got to say, I think I'd rather just have my brain melt. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. It is time, my chumes, for us to revisit the world of cyberpunk 27 after the new 2.0 update and the Phantom Liberty expansion. There's a lot to talk about, so let's chrome up, jack in, and get down to biz. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Schreier.

Hello. Hello. Hello. It's us again. We made it. Once again. Back at the table. You didn't think we were going to make it back for another week, but we did. You're ready to make a Prime podcast?

We're going to chrome up. Did you know there's a character on the television show Spider Games who's named Principal Quincy Primo? That's just a fun fact for you. He's a high school principal, you see. I do not know that. Anyway. That's a great name. I was using cyberpunk lingo since that's what we're talking about.

I just think it's funny for somebody to have the name Primo. That is where Prime comes from, I think. We are a listener-supported podcast where we make jokes and talk about video games. We love making this show every week for all of you. And we love doing it without any ads, without any corpo influence, one of those corpo rats getting in here, killing us what to do things, no way. We're nomads.

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at maximum fund.org slash join. Be a part of something. wholesome and good in this no good world. And we really appreciate all of you who are members. And of course, if you do become a member, you get to listen to monthly bonus episodes from Triple Click and from all the other maximum fun shows as well, though not every show does monthly shows. We do them every single month. There's a huge backlog that you can listen to. Our most recent one was talking about artificial intelligence and the movies Ex Machina and Her. Before that, we talked about Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. We talked about lots of games, lots of shows, just life stuff, whatever. There's tons of bonus stuff you can listen to. Pretty preem.

Prime stuff. It's some preem content, really. Maximumfund.org slash join is where you want to go to sign up for that. And yeah, so we are going to be, we're going to be talking about cyberpunk today. We've returned to cyberpunk 2077

almost three years after we first recorded a triple play on the game. All right, I wrote us a little preamble to go us into the mood to talk about this game. Prepared statement. Here we go. Cyberpunk. 2077 is a first-person role-playing game made by CD Project Red, the Polish studio most famous for their Witcher games based on the 1980s tabletop game world created by Mike Ponsmith.

The video game adaptation was initially released in December of 2020, and it was so unfinished and riddled with bugs that it became an epoch-defining scandal. These days, pulling a cyberpunk has become shorthand for a disastrous video game launch, especially of a big, ambitious game. Since then, it has been difficult to separate the mess of the mess. of Cyberpunk's launch from the content of the game itself. For three years, it seemed easier to talk around Cyberpunk 2077 than to actually talk about it, partly because it remained frustratingly in a state of not quite being,

even as the game became more stable with each update, and its cultural reputation was given a boost by 2022's pretty good Edge Runner's anime, which aired on Netflix. Now, in the fall of 2023, almost three years after it came out, Cybergh27 has been reborn and expanded with the simultaneous release, lease of the 2.0 update, which builds off of several preceding stability updates and overhauls huge parts of the game like character upgrades, leveling, and equipment, as well as the Phantom Liberty expansion, which adds a large new area to the game and leads players into a new

cyber spy thriller narrative starring Idraselba, which fits in with the game's existing narrative in some interesting ways, both thematically and in terms of narrative mechanics, since it takes place simultaneous to the original game's story. So we've all played different amounts of the game and the expansion at this point, we were all playing on advanced PC copies provided by CD Project Red. For my part, I played through a bunch of the game last year and earlier this year, and I think the 1.6 update. But then I stopped when they were like, oh, actually, it's going to get better again. So I restarted with 2.0. I've played through the entire thing this time, as well as all of Phantom Liberty.

I've played almost all of the possible endings. So I've really finally played Cyper Pump, which feels pretty good. I don't understand how you have the time for these things. Yeah, Kurt. I've been sick. Made time for cyberpunk every ending. Meanwhile, Jason and I are like struggling over here. Play through the whole thing, all of Phantom Liberty and just every ending while I was at it.

Yeah, just to see. Just to see what happens. Well, I really, I got really drawn into it. Also, I was just pretty sick this last week and haven't been able to do a lot of the things that I should have been doing. Getting sick is a boon for gaming time. Yeah, including recording podcasts. So it was easier to just kind of get lost in Night City. So that's what I played.

I talked some last week about how the game has definitely risen in my estimation now that I have a better sense of it as a complete object. Of course, that fuller understanding means I have plenty of criticisms of it as well. But mostly, I'm just glad to have finally played the actual games so that I can talk about it instead of talking around it. So let's do that. Let's talk about cyberpunk 2077. I know the two of you have been playing. Either one of you can go first. But what are you thinking of the game?

Yeah, can I just chime in real quick with one quick thing before we actually get into the meat of the game? Oh, you want to talk around it a little bit more. Yeah, just like some. Just because something just happened that I thought was funny. In the last three years, cyberpunk has become such shorthand for like a busted release that it is actually used as an example within game studios to like petition for delays.

And I know this because I literally, a week ago, I was on the phone to someone who told me that they pointed to cyberpunk as a way to get their own game delayed and were successful in that endeavor. So, yes, it has had a very real impact on the entire. entire games industry. But yeah, I'll get my thoughts on a sec. Mandy, why don't you go first with your thoughts? Sure.

I think I've played a little more than you, so I guess that makes sense. We can go in descending order. I haven't beaten the game and gotten every ending yet. It's less than that. Why don't you have the time for that? I don't know. Why not? I don't know.

It might be because I was continuing to work a job, not being sick. To be fair, you can finish this game pretty quickly. And then once you get to the final mission, you can just like get most of the endings except the secret ending. Right. You can save scum there. Yeah. just go back and do it again.

It's not actually that long if you focus on the story, which is largely what I did. Yeah, it's like 30 hours. Is that about right? Maybe. I mean, it depends on if you do side stuff. And I do think doing side stuff significantly improves the overall experience. So maybe I don't actually think that playing just mainlining the narrative would even be a good way to play. So I take that back.

Yeah. So I've been doing kind of a weird thing with this because when we played it for our triple play back in 2020, I played more than y'all. I got about 10 hours in and change. I was pretty far in the story further than I think I knew at the time. And I remembered it really well this time. So I created a totally new character this time and played the first couple hours of the main story, just thinking I'd play all the way through to get to Phantom Liberty.

But I remembered it so well that I was like, I've essentially done this before. I think I'm good to just go ahead and skip to the DLC. So then I did that. So now I have three. competing saves. I have my 2020 save. I have my new character that I built. And then I have a third character because I was not permitted to port either one of those two characters into the DLC. So I have three different Vs, three different hair colors. Quiz me on that later if you want. They all look

gorgeous. So then I played about like six to eight hours of Phantom Liberty. If people have played it and they want to know where I am, I met the party. And it's Henson. Is that the name of the person whose mansion I was snuck into. Colonel Kurt Hansen. Yeah. Casino themed party. So yeah, that's where I am. And I really like a lot of the changes mechanically to the combat.

I'm sure we're going to get more into that. But we said that a bit last week or whenever we did our triple click picks and talked about some of the new changes. That was really, really easy to notice those changes. But as I've been replaying the original. version of the game because I actually then went back and started replaying the beginning of the game again. This is really weird. I don't know why I've done this because I just wanted to refresh my memory on some of the things that had happened. I remember some of the things I didn't like as much about this game.

And one of those things is how oppressive Knight City feels to hang out in. And I just, the vibe of it, this is subjective. This is just me, maybe. But like, this is a world that really hates you. Like, it is a tough hang to be in Night City. Like, you are constantly shit upon and everyone is having a hard time. And that's, that's okay. Like, it's, you know, there's still power fantasy element here. You have these cool cybernetics. I got a million different kinds of shotguns.

They feel great. I'm amazing in every way. But just story-wise, I'm interested to hear what you think, Kirk, is somebody who's beaten the game. but as somebody who's kind of like halfway through in so many ways, I feel like this game is really borrowing from a lot of film noir tropes as opposed to what I would consider like classic, you know, snow crash, romance or cyberpunk tropes in the sense that it's just really dark,

a lot of like seedy underbelly of the world, you're kind of this lone detective-ish character who's just trying to track down different people who often end up being in terrible circumstances, the more you find out about things, the more you're like, wow, it's even worse than I thought. The corporations are even more evil than I thought. The brain dances go to even more messed up places than I ever could have fathomed. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, it isn't just that it's a science fiction story. It's that it's very much a greedy noir story. And so you kind of

have to be on board for that level of just an oppressive feeling. And I mean, oppressive is the adjective, not just the sociopolitical intention. Yeah, I have a quick thought on that. Yeah, go for having played a bunch of the game and sort of let myself become very immersed in it, and I would describe this as a very immersive game. But you are then immersed in this world that, like you say, is this very bleak place full of really awful things that happen to people, and including you, there are no great outcomes. None of the endings, there's no happy ending.

There's an ending that I got, the first ending that I happened to get that I think of as a pretty fitting canon ending that I've found to be really, cool and really exciting. I really liked that ending. And then all the other endings I've explored, including the new ending that's added with Phantom Liberty. They've all just been like different darker turns that feel a little bit alternate to me.

But there's no happy ending because really for no one in Night City, there's no happy endings. It's not a happy place. It's this awful corporate city that is like really oppressive in a lot of ways. And yeah, it's Night City man. It's not Day City. Yeah, it's night. Yeah. Go to Day City if you want it to be nice. Yeah, there's nowhere nice in this world. So anyway,

Anyways, I also find the world really bleak and depressing, and yet I really was pretty taken with it after a while. Just with, I like allowed myself to kind of be immersed in it. And I found that to be a very compelling experience, at least for me. Even for all of the sort of pastiche and the awfulness around me, just the feeling of driving around is really nice. I guess some of that is just, it looks so amazing now on PC. but like it's just like a beautiful kind of oppressive place to be and I found myself actually enjoying that part of it. But you do have to be down for that. It's not a fun world to be in or a nice place where good things happen.

Though occasionally nice things do happen and there are these profound moments of beauty, etc. Yeah, I want to hear what Jason thinks of it before I go on. Sure. So yeah, I mean I haven't gotten to Phantom Liberty yet, not for lack of trying, but. unlike you Maddie, I didn't skip right to the DLC. I started a new play-through and then just kept playing through. I didn't do the back-and-forth thing, which I found actually a good way to play it

because the systems feel so different, especially the skill system and the driving system, that it feels like you're playing something that's pretty significantly different than the game that we played three years ago. I actually want to re-listen to our triple play and it was interesting. Yeah, me too.

Hearing some of our thoughts that. And so now I'm like, I'm much further than I was when I first played it. I did all the Judy and Evelyn stuff. I'm, like, finishing up the voodoo boy stuff. And I'm really enjoying it largely because of the new skill system that makes it a lot of fun to, like, zip around. I've like built up my reflexes and have this dash that is super fun to play with. The Aero Dash, which is a new feature that they added. That is like a transformative game feature.

It makes the game. fun and yeah it's a huge improvement and so I rigged myself with a double jump and I got the dashing that was in the base game but the air dash is new and between the two of them yeah but yes now you feel like you're playing holl-night when you have the double jump and then air dash um and then like and i i'm buffing up my shotguns it's funny um back then when i first played it i was like man the stealth kind of sucks in this game and i have the same exact kind of thought process as i was playing it today. Stealth still sucks. Um, the best way to play this game is to run and gun. I don't totally agree. I play a stealthy build. It's pretty fun. Okay. Interesting. Well, I want to hear more about that

in a sec, because I've found it's so unenjoyable to like try to sneak around because you're just doing the same sort of thing. There's no like interesting way to like, like distract enemies or doing it. Like, the only way to distract enemies is to hack something and be like distract enemies and then hope that that that gets them. But anyway, um, I'm enjoying it. I'm really into the story. I keep thinking about how similar it is to Balders Gate 3 and that you have something horrible in your head that you're trying to get rid of. That's true. We do. Which is funny because

they both, I guess you could say they both entered early access in 2020 and they both came out this year. Interesting thought of experience. So kind of similar trajectories there. I'm going to keep playing and get to Phantom Liberty because I'm very curious to see what that is like.

And yeah, I'm enjoying it. I think overall it still feels to me sort of like it did back then. like this is a game that is trying to mash together GTA and DeusX and isn't really picking a lane, so it's kind of like a watered down version of them both. I think that's still the case, but in 2023, both kind of elements of the game feel much better than they did before. So instead of maybe like a C level version of Deos X and GTA smashed together, now it's maybe a B plus version of both of those. The GTA parts, I mean, you're not getting the same level of just kind of like

sandbox exploration, but you can run around and get into gunfights with cops and escape them. And it's got the exact same system as GTA now, exact same wanted system where you have to get out of the radius of the cone of view of the cops to knock your stars down. Yeah, just like the Wild West. Exactly. Just like the Wild West. And then the day of sex stuff, I mean, the shooting feels better in that if you get your new abilities and stuff, you can, you can like, the shooting.

I mean, essentially the core mechanics are the same as they were back then, but like, because of the new abilities, you can, like, create a build that makes it feel a little bit sleeker. Maybe you get your, I don't know, your recovery time down or whatever it is. And you can, you can have more fun with that stuff and experiment more with character customization, which I think adds a good, a good level of strategy and fun to the whole experience. So yeah, I'm enjoying it. I'm very much into it. But I should say also, I was actually pretty into the game. game in 2020. I just stopped playing because of the bugs and was like, I'm just going to wait until the bugs are fixed. So it's so surprised and I'm into it now. A funny thing I said was, I'll play this in six months when they fixed all the buttons. Yeah, right. I said that a couple times. I was so optimistic. Six months. Yeah, no. Well, to be fair, they did fix, they did fix, they did fix bugs within those six months. Yeah, it took them a little, even that took longer than six months. Yeah, well, there were some fundamental things. It's so funny, man, when I, so I did like a post-mortem on cyberpunk afterwards after the launch where I talked to a bunch of

the developers about their experiences there and one of them told me, so this is E32019, the release date is announced. They're like, we're coming out April 2020 and this person who was talking to me said they thought it was a joke. They were like, I thought it was going to come out in 2022.

Like that's literally what they thought was going to happen. They were like April 2020 are you frigging kidding me? So of course I mean, now it feels like the game is complete. Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of thoughts on that, I guess. One thing, just to the upgrade tree, the way they've changed the upgrade tree in this game. Someone in our Discord actually made this

observation that I totally agree with, that the way that they've changed it can best be summed up by the feeling you get when you level up now, which is, hell yeah, I can't wait to go to my upgrade tree and pick a new perk because you now have this perk tree and every single one of them is cool. Like, even if it's just, one of them is just you can exit your car in a really cool way. Yeah, you can slide out really. It's cool. It's cool. I've been playing around with it. It's cool. Yeah. So it's like there's each thing that you unlock, is actually pretty useful. There are a couple that are sort of like,

you know, you'll do more headshot damage. But it used to be, they were all like that. And now it's like tons of cool stuff. And you can kind of see it more clearly. You can see what you're leveling up for. Well, hold on, correction. It used to be that the coolest ones were like on the edges and you had to like take a lot to get into them.

Not all of them were like that. But yes, yeah. Your point is true, but. Yes, it was that. But I think it was also a UI-U-U-X issue, which the UI is generally overhauled in a, just in subtle ways that I think are really interesting. I would watch the hell out of a YouTube video if someone wanted to do a comparison.

Even like your mobile phone, which shows you your text messages, I read all my text messages. So this time through, there's all this storytelling going on on V's phone where you're texting with people and having little conversations. One of the best things you can do, I mentioned this last week, but the relationships are really strong in this game. They're four possible romantic relationships. The one with Judy in particular, which can only be done with female V because Judy is a lesbian. canonically and isn't just like most video game characters where she's kind of what's it called

like player sexual or something yeah the Balders Gay 3 approach so which is cool because it informs her character you learn a lot about her backstory which just like she is an actual person with like a sexual preference and that comes up in who she is and then also just she's a great character and so i was in a relationship with her and it's really fun she's texting all the time even as I'm playing phantom liberty I get these really cute drunk texts from her where she's like heyo like Butts, butts, butts, smiley face or something. And then the next day, she'll text and be like, oh, my God, like, I'm so embarrassed that I texted you. And I can kind of reply.

Anyways, the UI makes it so that you want to engage with that stuff more, be at the phone, which previously playing this game, I never looked at the phone. I couldn't deal with it. It was like weird and overwhelming. It was so much more irritating. It would pop up at the weirdest times, too. Like, it felt like the timing of the sound of the phone and when it would appear were worse. And they've definitely finessed a lot of that. Right.

They have. And it's just so the way they, so all of those things are better in the menus. And then I think the menus for the upgrades are a lot better because you now look at this tree for reflexes and there are all these cool little drawings on the neat things you're building toward. And you're like, oh, cool, if I get nine points in reflexes, I'm going to get that air dash. Like I can't wait for that. So in four levels, I'm going to get it. And that's a core part of the loop of this kind of game. Like, that's part of what I find so immersive and engrossing.

It's just that feeling of like, all right, cool. I'll just go do a gig. And that'll get me some XP and that'll let me level up. and soon I'm going to get a cool new ability, and it lets you get into that zone a little bit more. I want to mention some narrative stuff about this game, having played through the whole story and also having played through all of Phantom Liberty,

that I think, well, I know we didn't get into it all on our triple play, and that I don't want to leave totally unaddressed because for me, the narrative of this game becomes much, much more interesting in its back half, and then even more interesting when you take it as a whole and take it as a part of this world that they've built, and kind of understand it in that context.

And then Phantom Liberty becomes really interesting, I think, in the context of the main story. Like they're really interesting kind of counterparts to one another. They're both ultimately the stories of a guy and a woman. She's a net runner who winds up getting embroiled in some sort of corporate situation where a corporation takes control over her and she loses herself to it. They both involve the black wall, which is the super interesting concept I just talked about on our bonus episode about AI. But basically, there was this one guy. He like unleashed a bunch of AIs and destroyed the net, which kind of destroyed civilization. Like it destroyed a whole chunk of civilization.

And then they wound up building this firewall, Netwatch, this company built this firewall that blocked out all of these crazy wild rogue AIs that this dude had built. Bart Moss is his name. And you'll hear about him in the game. The stuff is all in the game, but you could just play it not knowing any of this. But anyways, that becomes really important later because there's this character, hunting him that I don't even know if the two of you have even met, but she's like... Yes, I literally, I just met her in the video like. Okay, so it's wild. When she's introduced, it's like, wait, who is this?

It comes kind of abruptly. But having finished the whole story, Alth is like a really important character, maybe the most important character other than Johnny. And her relationship with Johnny is like this crucial thing for the main storyline. So then in Phantom Liberty, Songbird, so me, is a net runner. And what's his name, Reed, Idriselba's character. Yeah, Idriselva's character. He's basically a C.

agent. So he's the Johnny in that narrative, and so me, Songbird is the alt in that narrative. And instead of the Arasaka Corp, who are like the corporation that has taken on a lot of power in Knight City and as a result are the ones that Johnny was always raging against, they're kind of like definitely dominant in Knight City. Militech, who are the super corp that like run America, basically. Like, Rosalind Myers is like a former Militech executive. Like there's this whole wild history with like the Unification War and the NU.S. and the free states and Knight City's unique role as this independent city that's like backed by Arasaka because Arasaka is always backing the free states against Militech.

So you've got basically a Polish game studio is making a game where the United States is recast as a sort of American version of post-Soviet Russia where they're waging a territorial war to try to reclaim the states that used to be a part of America. It's super interesting stuff. Like it is great world building and it's all right there in the game. but it's possible to kind of just play through the game and let that kind of slide by you and just be like, okay, you get to the end and it's like, I don't really know what's going on. I kind of felt that way the first time. So anyways, I just think that all of that is actually really interesting.

And the last point that I will make is that I think that Phantom Liberty is a stronger story overall because I think that what they're doing, to me at least, as maybe just as an American. But also I just, there's more there, I think, with the NUSA, the fact that America collapsed in the next. 90s and like rose again as this corporate nation that then there was basically a war of aggression, a territorial war of aggression by Rosalind Myers, who's like the president that you rescue at the beginning, who you can express ambivalence toward the whole time or you can totally just get on board and Johnny like hates her. And knowing the full story of that. Well, he's like an anarchist punk guy. He is, but he was also in the military and he signed up and like was super burned by it. And part of Phantom Liberty's story is him telling you

about that. And it's like a really interesting part of his story at the very beginning. Yeah, he tells you about his experiences as a vet and how he soured on the whole thing. And if you get to make fun of him or not, depending on whether you have an antagonistic relationship with Johnny. So I think that that story is just very interesting, the story of like what's happening in America and Knight's City's unique role in it, this kind of Casablanca, like neutral state that, especially Dogtown, which is itself a kind of neutral state within a neutral state. It's like a lawless war zone. It's a little apocalypse now. Which was invented for Phantom Liberty, yeah. And it's a place that was basically a beachhead for the NUSA during the unification

where when they invaded Knight City. And then they just ended the war. And this guy, Colonel Hansen, just got stuck there. So he became a warlord and just runs this part of the city. Anyways, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyone who played the game will think this is interesting. Anyone who hasn't, maybe won't. I mean, it is.

I want to throw out there that this is some pretty cool stuff. and it makes me want to play more cyberpunk games. Like I've really come to like this world similar to how I came to like the world of the Witcher and to really appreciate the way the game expressed this very complex, this very complex world and all of this lore in a really interesting way. Yeah, I think Phantom Liberty is a lot stronger than the rest of the game narratively. And I say that as someone who didn't get all the original endings, but has been switching back and forth.

And they've even done some softening of John. and some of the Phantom Liberty D.L.C. in terms of how he talks to you, like, even if you choose to have an antagonistic relationship with him, it's more playful and less insulting. Like, Johnny, I feel certain I talked about this in our original triple play, but part of what's tough about Johnny Silverhand is your character in your head, at least for me, so he's very sexist, like, just openly very sexist and is constantly making sexist comments. Like, that's just part of his worldview.

And you just have to put up with that as female V. I mean, presumably you do it. male v as well. None of us have played that because, you know, why would we? That character doesn't exist. But it's like a big part of the antagonism that the two of you share. And I think it's actually a pretty interesting story since I know at least one of the endings or at least one of the implied endings is Johnny might get stuck in your body and he's very angry at the idea of being stuck in this female body. And so there is this sort of like antagonistic yet queer storyline that sort of thrums throughout this game that I think a lot of people were both

unnerved and intrigued by. Like, it really depends which queer person you ask about that. But regardless, to just complete the thought, in Phantom Liberty, I think the writing is overall stronger. The themes are stronger. It feels like a expansion written by people who've had a lot more time to sit with the idea of Johnny as a character. And also Idriselba is a fascinating character. He's, like, cool to be around.

like he isn't as annoying to be around as Johnny can be at times. Like there's something to be said. Like if you're going to write a video game where you have to spend a heck of a lot of time with an NPC, like to have somebody who's constantly abrasive is very difficult. Like I'm not going to lie. It's one of the reasons why I probably won't go back and complete the game because much as I love Keanu Reeves's acting performance, I'm just like, I don't want to be insulted this time.

I just don't care for it, you know? I think even the second half of the game feels like a game, written by people who had spent more time with the concept because the second half of the core game as well really, Johnny really transforms into a much more interesting and sympathetic character. Some of that is based on your relationship with him, but you go and do stuff related to his past life. You meet up with past members of his band. There's a lot of stuff with Rogue who's a fantastic character and his relationship with Rogue. There's a lot with Alt and him blaming himself for what happened to Alt and seeking her forgiveness.

You really can kind of, the story is about you merge. with Johnny and the two of you, according to what's happening, this relic chip in your head, you're becoming more and more like one another, which is something that's brought up more and more times. And this was something I will cop to you. I said, I was disappointed by this in our original triple play, that I didn't get the sense that the game was playing with some of these concepts of self, digital selfhood. What does it mean to be yourself in an age where this kind of technology exists? And they are fully exploring it, especially in the second half, in really interesting ways. And by the end of the game, even the base game, I actually really had come to

like Johnny a lot. Even when he would turn up on random gigs and be a dick, I'd be like, out there is again, my boy here to talk some shit. Well, he's so much more likable in Phantom Liberty that I feel like I can understand how he's going to get there because like in a way I've almost skipped ahead to a version of Johnny who's bearable. So it's like I've gotten to see a sneak peek at what the game could be. But I think also because this game, I mean, this is part of like an interesting thing, just from a media criticism perspective, where we all have to think to ourselves, like, is this game itself sexist or racist, or is it depicting a sexist world that your character is existing in? And I would argue that largely cyberpunk is aiming for the latter.

It doesn't always nail it, but it's trying to depict a world that's very aggressively against you, and you are just existing in it. And the female characters, like, the evidence for that, I think, is that the female characters are extremely well written. but they are in a world that they're constantly exploited and there's a lot of naked women who are dead that you see. Right, and they sometimes suffer horribly. I mean, like what happens to Evelyn is like, Evelyn's storyline.

But also, I would say Evelyn is one of the best written characters in the game. So it's like there is that push and pull of like, is this game sexist or is it depicting sexist situations? I don't know where I land on that, but I still want to give credit to the fact that these characters are really well written. and I think that's important in and of itself. But I also think that that's part of why this game just isn't ever going to resonate with everyone, because it's like trying to touch the third rail.

And in that sense, I'm like, well, I'm glad it's trying because I like it when games try to depict sex and sex work and like these dangerous situations and have this really multi-ethnic city and like depicting a future that, yeah, the future freaking sucks in cyberpunk, but like not all futures have to be hopeful. Some of them can be terrible and oppressive and like Ridden with gangs and the street life Where nobody seems like they have a fair shake And even the people who work for the corporations

Seem like they're having a terrible time Like I there's no good outcomes It doesn't feel like a game that's just being tawjee for the sake of being tawjee I think it suffers from your Sure but I think it suffers well I think it suffers from the problem A lot of games suffer from which is that you're ultimately playing a video game Where like 20 minutes after whatever you see you're gonna be blasting dudes heads off. Yes, exactly. It's kind of inherently Taji. And so, I mean, I think, like, I don't think

you're going to do much better than this and it comes to capturing some of that stuff in a game. That said, I mean, you mentioned sexism and racism. The racism has really struck me on this particular play-through, maybe because last time I didn't get to the voodoo boys, the voodoo boys are kind of like, I don't know. I don't really know as a white dude, I don't really know what to make of them or how to feel about them, but it certainly feels like a kind of, you know, It certainly makes me feel uncomfortable that this like entirely black gang is portrayed as these kind of like, like broken English speaking, like total dick assholes who are just like kind of like really just horrible, horrible people. And like by the end of what when you find out what they've done to what they did to Evelyn, you just want to like betray them to the corporation, which I did at the when I met that net runner dude. Oh, the net watch guy.

Yeah. Yeah, and I do know, and I'm not sure what the exact backstory is, but Mike Ponce with the creator of Cyberpunk is a black man. So that is also something that I have to consider here. So, yeah, I'm just not sure how to feel about it. All I know is that it made me a little uncomfortable. And I don't know if that particular thing is deliberate because it doesn't feel like it's making a commentary. It just feels like it's like they want this cool voodoo themed gang as opposed to some of the

like sexual exploitation stuff where it's like it's trying to say something, whether it's clunky or not. One other thing I'll say is that having done just done all of that stuff, it feels to me like this is really the turning point or the kind of the, I don't know, the midpoint of Keanu's story of Johnny Silverhand's story is really when you find out about his relationship with, um, with, uh, Alt, Cunningham. And you see that whole flashback stuff. And it feels like from there, it feels like, oh, okay, I understand this guy a little bit better. He's a little bit deeper than just like punk rocker or wanted to blow up a building. And now I can I can already see that he's going to start having a more complicated relationship with the players.

So I do think that like, Maddie, to your point, I think if you're not enjoying Mikianna's stuff, getting past that might help with that. But I don't know, might not. Yeah, I remember struggling with the Voodo boys the first time around too. And I mean, I being married to Dina, who has so many Jamaican relatives, some of whom have ended up getting co-opted into street gang culture. Like these are countries in the diaspora of, they're Haitian characters, the Voodoo Boys, but like the Caribbean diaspora. Like these are countries that have been so just utterly shat upon by imperialism

that it's like there are some really fascinating stories you could tell. And I would have loved to see a version of the Voodoo Boys that like took that perspective into account. And I don't personally feel like that's in the game. Like maybe it's part of the process of the game and we just aren't aware of it. But like as somebody who at least is proximate, to families who care about this stuff a lot. I wasn't really impressed by it.

But I'm also like, I get that this game wants to depict a really diverse and vibrant future where all of these different types of people have emigrated to the city, and all of them are criminals. Like, it's not like, oh, the white people are heroes in this game, but the people of color are terrible rapists. Everybody is pretty fucking bad.

And also, it's not like the Voodibyze are the only black people. They're not. They're not. And I do think, though, for what it's worth, like introducing Adris Elba's character does, it shifts things a little bit. Like, there are things there that I'm like, okay, yes, Keanu Reeves is he's one of the most famous mixed race actors of our generation. He's the lead of the game. He gets to be more complex over time. Idris Elba, extremely famous black actor. Like, obviously the game's giving opportunities to extremely talented people. It's just that I also feel like there are parts of the game that are very clunkily written and more phoned in for lack of. of a better way to put it. Like there's just color there, like literally, where they're like, this part looks cool. I don't know. Let's have them be Haitian. And they're called the voodoo boys. And that's about as much as anyone thought about it.

You know what I mean? And then it's like, but we're going to spend a lot of time thinking about who Judy is and her lesbian identity. And like, that's just kind of too bad. Like, I get the game spend a lot of time on one thing and not on another. But then the result is that when people talk about the game, they're like, I don't know if this is good. To be clear, the Voodoo Boys come from Mike Ponsmith's world. Like, they were not created by Citi Praternity. But in Mike Ponsmith World, originally, the Voodoo Boys were actually white guys who were appropriating voodoo culture.

I googled a lot of this at the time because I was really curious about how Mike Ponsmith came up with the idea. It's not until Cyberpunk's world, the video game, that they actually become Haitian characters with some voodoo practitioners as part of the gang. That doesn't play a huge role in the game. But it's all in the wikis. So I think Mike Ponsmith originally conceived it as a commentary on appropriative white people. Got it. I don't know. There's a line in the game where the guy you're talking to is like, well, they call us that.

We don't call ourselves. Yeah. And there's a little bit there, but it's a little shallow. And I think it's shallow is a perfect word. It's similar with Arasaka and the sort of depiction of Japanese culture for sure, which of course has a long history with cyberpunk media. And it's another reason that I think that Phantom Liberty is on stronger footing just because the depiction of the American military complex reemerging as a military super corp that takes over the country is really interesting. And also the general depiction of Knight City as basically, you know how there are these tech guys now who are buying up land in Northern California because they want to build this super city? That's what Knight City was in the 90s.

It was this super rich dude, Richard Knight, I think was his name, something. night and he builds this city on the east on the west coast of california and he's like i want to build like a city that will be impervious to the coming fall because i see that this is basically a world where the u.s didn't exactly lose the cold war but the USSR is still around the u.s collapsed in the 90s because of an economic collapse because of income inequality because the rich people were so rich and the poor people were so poor people were so poor that the whole country and like the social fabric of america collapsed and as a result like these different states to declare independence i I definitely recommend going and just like reading the cyberpunk wiki for the history of the United

States in this world. I mean, there's some cool stuff in there. So you're in this city that's this like corporate hell world that exists that has become what it is because of the backing of different corporations. Anyways, they can do a whole lot with that. And I think they're on their firmest footing where the corporate identity is separated from any cultural identity. Just because it becomes more directly about money and power and, you know, the things that

we think about a lot in America and a little less of this kind of ham-fisted or at least overly simplistic view of like cultural differences in the ways that those might express themselves in 80 years or like an imagined gang and what they would be like yeah I wonder also I mean I don't know a lot about Mike pawnsmith personally but I feel like as Americans we can look at a game about America that's making commentary on it and even the original cyberpunk like it's written by an American guy. We understand what the commentary is. The developers are European predominantly white development team. They're trying to write a game about America. That's going to be difficult because not all of them are from here and they aren't all familiar with everything. So no matter

what, when you start to introduce additional cultures on top of that, it's like, okay, you're getting even further and further away from what you might be familiar with. Do you know what I'm saying? It's going to be even more difficult to include. So it makes it makes a lot. It's going to be even more difficult to include. So it makes sense that Phantom Liberty, its storyline is just on stronger ground. It's easier for us to understand like a satire of American imperialism and militarism. Like that's something that unfortunately I think everyone all across the planet can understand and satirize pretty easily. I think that when the game begins to really wrestle with just a slightly different angle of inquiry, which is the question of how does the world change and what does it mean to return to the world all these years after you died,

especially for someone like Johnny Silverhand who basically raided Arasaka twice the first time to try to rescue all and then the second time backed by Militech their corporate enemies on this military attack which is where he died and also accidentally nuked a whole building

and how like just like how he might be reacting to the passage of time to the way that the world might change and then how you might react to being overwritten with that person and having to reckon with having that person in your head like that stuff is all super interesting Like stuff about identity and how it changes, which doesn't actually, it's framed against the backdrop of this corporate hellscape and there's a lot of that stuff going on as well. But that to me is the heart of the game. Those were the most affecting and interesting parts of it.

I really like that stuff. The like immersive first person presentation, which I think is just really, really strong throughout is that it's most effective is when it's just you're dealing with your own identity because you're so inside of V's head. And they do so many smart tricks to really put you there. And one thing, I want to point out one thing about this game that I think is really cool. I have it in my notes. I just want to mention it. One thing this game does that's very immersive that I wish more video games did is play with time lapse, montage, and the passage of time.

So many video games don't do this. They just have everything happen right one after the next thing. Like you just do something and then it's over and then someone calls you and then you just go do the next thing. And it starts to just feel fake over time because you're like, why is everything just happening one thing right after the next thing. Like, why are we going in order? There's a lot of coincidences and you're like,

this guy just happens to be here? Okay, and he's the next quest. So in cyberpunk, there are just a lot of sequences where you wait and then it just fades and then time passes and it says sometime later or you'll just have to wait a while for someone to call you to tell us something and then like time has to actually pass. Anyways, I think that's like part of the immersive, this game's immersive strength as that kind of an experience. It's cinematic.

It is one. It's an old cinematic. trick. Yeah, it's a film trick. The montage at the beginning where you are becoming best friends with Jackie. It was pretty impressive. It is, and it's really effective, and I think it makes that part of the game, that part of the story

much more impactful, because it makes you feel a little more like you're inside of this character. I just wish more games did it, because, yeah, like you said, Maddie, it's a really old cinematic trick. I just really, I don't see it as much as I would have thought, and it's very effective in this game. Yeah, I think ultimately, if people have the stomach for it, I recommend

cyberpunk is violent and as gory and is angry of a world as it takes place in. So I feel like it needs a lot of trigger warnings, but I also am just like, I don't know. It's doing a lot of stuff I don't see often, even though I have problems with so much of it. I'm glad I kept trying and I'm, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad that it's like playable now and it actually works and it doesn't crash. But yeah, I'm not I'm not sure I wanted to be a triple click pick, though. I'm not sure it's there for me. I think one of the reasons it's so important for it to be such an impressive, like, bleak game to play, Maddie. And one of the reasons that I feel like it's actually important for it to feel unpleasant to play in some ways is that otherwise you get, like, Chuds like Elon Musk were like, oh, this is so cool.

I want to live in this world. Exactly. My fantasy. And like, I'm going to build neural links so we can all be like cyberpunk. And I think if you don't have enough kind of bleakness, heavy-handed bleakness, at the time. then you you confuse it for a power of fantasy. That's true. That's a good point.

It's pretty hard to feel romantic about having anything stuck in your head after playing cyberpunk 20s. No, it does not romanticize. It does not romanticize the experience of living in this world. But what if it was Keanu? He's so pretty. Even Keanu, it's like the most unpleasant Keanu reasons ever. I know he's lame the worst guy.

Yeah, he's a real dirtbag. But I've come to kind of love him in my way. All right. Well, that's enough for now, I think. It is a very interesting game, and I'm glad we finally got to really talk about it instead of talking around it. Let's take a break, and then we'll be back for one more thing. The human mind can be tricky. Your mental health can be complex.

Your emotional life can be complicated. So it helps to talk about it. I'm John Moe. Join me each week on my show, Depression Mode with John Moe. It's in-depth conversations about mental health with writers, musicians, comedians, doctors and experts. folks like Noah Khan, Sashir Zameda, and Surgeon General Vivek Merti. We talk about depression, anxiety, trauma, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism. We have the kind of conversations that a lot of folks are hesitant to have themselves.

Listen, and you won't feel as alone, and you'll have some laughs too. Depression Mode for Maximum Fun.org at maximum fun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Daniel Barwella, technology and data specialists. I'm here with Kira Gowan, Ad Operations Specialist, and we are both worker owners here at Maximum Fun. October is National Co-op Month, so we're celebrating our brand new co-op and others with an event called Co-October. We've got special events all month long, starting with a live Q&A on YouTube, where MaxFund Worker Owners will answer your questions on Friday, October 6th, and much more to come. We also want to tell you about some incredible limited edition merch exclusively available to MaxFund members until the end of October. If you're already a member of Max Fun, you've shown that you care about our shows and what we do.

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My one more thing is a video game called Lies of P. Not surprised you're playing this. A game I have heard is a Bloodbourne clone. It is. I've got to say, this game sounds pretty cool, but what a terrible name. Okay, go on. But it's about a sexy Pinocchio. It's about...

Atrocious title. Horrible time. So, yeah, this is a game about Pinocchio, but it's really blood-borne. It is... And yes, you were really technically... named P, though you're playing as Pinocchio. Jason, you'll be happy to know that Pinocchio upgrades what is known as his P. organ in order to become more powerful.

So you're regularly getting upgrades for your Pee organ in this game. So yeah, this is a pretty shameless Bloodborn clone. It's made by NeoWiz Studios, a Korean game developer. And you play as Pinocchio. He looks just like the star of Bloodborn. You're fighting through the city of Crot, which is actually a really cool video game setting. setting and the story is like surprisingly great. So the story of this game is the Geppetto who made

Pinocchio, of course. He's, no, he's just Geppetto. Though you do pick up, you pick up a cricket who goes by kind of Gemini. It's spelled like Gemini cricket, but it's a mechanical cricket who talks to you and tells you what's going on. Okay, that's cute. So this whole game narratively works much better than I thought that it would have. It's been really, really cool so far. I've played, I don't know four or five hours. I'm sort of in the first act. And yeah, you play as Pinocchio. In this world, Geppetto created these super puppets that have become integral to life everywhere. Like, everyone uses the puppets basically as, you know, labor around their houses. And then the puppets all malfunction one day and just start straight up murdering everybody. Like just violently bludgeoning

everyone to death. And it's this horrible uprising. Like we all know will happen with puppets in reality. And you side with the puppets and kill all the humans? Well, and the idea is, the central idea is that Pinocchio is both a puppet and a real boy. He's a little bit of both. So he kind of lives in both worlds, which gives him access to some places that the humans can't reach. But then he has to lie. There's a whole lying mechanic where, like, you're not allowed into the base, like the hub zone, unless you tell it you're human, but that's a lie. And then as you lie, I think there's like a painting of Pinocchio and his nose gets longer and longer.

Dory and Ray. Though your character's nose does not get any longer. Of course. It stays the same. The same little perfect button nose. What about his pee organ? Does that get longer? His pee organ gets more potent as you play the game.

I don't know if it gets longer, really. But yeah, I mean, it's very much like Bloodborn, though with some ideas from Sekiro, some ideas from Dark Souls 3, it has a Perry system that's similar to Sekiro. It's pretty tough. I've seen people talking about how hard it gets toward the end. But also, seen people raving about it. Our friends with the besties love this game, in particular. Our buddy Russ Frustick has been telling me how much he loves it.

He actually shared something that comes to the very end, a sort of tease that plays at the end of the credits that I will say nothing about. Does the blue fairies show up? No, I'm not going to say, I'm not going to respond to that and not say what it is, but it is super cool. Maddie, I'll tell you off the year. No spoilers for the original story of Pinocchio. No, no, no. This would be a delightful surprise if you found it. But it is very cool and has made me want to play through to the end.

And I've really enjoyed what I've played of it. It is just this mode of game, the Souls mode where you're. kind of exploring and it's hard and you're memorizing the level and you're getting better and you're stuck and you're frustrated and then you beat the boss and you get a new thing like it's just that bad feeling it gives you that and it's also really lovely looking and like I said the world in the story are surprisingly cool so I'm liking it and apparently it runs well on steam deck so I have it installed on steam deck as well so that's lies of p I'm sure a lot of listeners already know about it just wanted to say that I'm playing it and really enjoying it mattie what's your one more thing

Mine is also a video game. It's a game called Cacoon, which I'm playing for PC. And it is delightful. It is a puzzle game that I have compared to Portal in terms of how great I feel when I solve a puzzle. And in terms of the variability of the environmental puzzles in terms of difficulty and design, the more you play, the more you're like, oh, I can do this with the puzzle solving ability. which is just the freaking best. There's no dialogue. There's no names for anything in the world.

You play as a little bug and you're just in isometric view wandering around this bug-like, squishy world. Everything feels super tactile. Like you poke things and you pick up a little sphere and the sphere gives you different powers and you move it to and fro. It's just extremely pleasant.

It's really great. If you liked Portal at all and if you like puzzle games at all, at all, you absolutely need to play cocoon. And if you need any more convincing, it's made by, well, it's made by a few people, but one of them worked on Limbo and Inside. So if you liked those games, then you might, you might like this one as well. It's just freaking great. I played all of it despite that I'm supposed to be playing cyberpunk because I couldn't stop playing it. And it's like six hours. It's delightful. It's great. I think short. Yeah, I played a little bit of it

And it's really, really freaking cool. We love a short puzzle game that just makes you feel good in your brain, you know? And it has those little moments at the beginning that I'm glad you're not describing specifically, but there are these moments in the beginning of that game that are like, what? And that is the magic of the game. Yeah, and the music is incredible. One of my coworkers interviewed them about it. And apparently the person who designed the music made their own synthesizer.

So can't be replicated. One of those freaks, a real synthesizer. real sickos who likes to design their own synthesizer to max the synthesized sounds that you get and it's really worth it there's some real soundscapes in this one but i feel like make me smarter when i listen to them which you need for a game but yeah great game really good yeah it's very cool i'm looking forward to playing more uh jason what is your one more thing my god i mean the number of games that i know what's the hell this time of year it's god i got yeah man there's so many i just got a review code for city skylines. I have Spider-Man, I've cocoon, all this shit, war groove too.

Anyway, I've been playing a game called Assassin's Creed Mirage. And I'm not going to get too much into this game because I haven't actually played that much just yet. I'm only a couple hours in. There's kind of like in true Assassin's Creed style. There's like a whole intro sequence and then the title comes up. And so I'm like, I don't know, an hour past the title. So a few hours in. So I played a chunk. Man, it's bumming me out. I'm really, I'm bouncing off of it pretty hard for a couple of reasons. So for some context here, this is a, a DLC to the last game, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, that was then blown out and turned into a full game that's now called Mirage. And it stars a guy named Basim, who played a key role in Assassin's Street, Valhalla.

And the kind of the hook of this game, Mirage, is that it's a return to old school, Assassin's Creed. After the last three games, Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, were all kind of big, Witcher style, open world RPGs. The latter two had branching dialogue. There's like RPG items, systems, and quests and all this massive bloated stuff. This is more of a, hey, we're going to go back to the Assassin's Creed Unity and Syndicate days where it's mostly about assassinating people and not like using a bunch of special abilities in combat. And it feels. It feels. It feels. It feels. It feels very janky to me. The combat is just not very fun. The climbing is really not very fun. They've gone back to the old school climbing where you have to find handholds instead of just being

able to scale anything. And it's a really a downgrade. I mean, in theory, it's cool that you should have to be like making decisions. But in practice, it's like, oh, God, like, I just jumped and lost, like, a solid five minutes of progress because I fell off the wrong thing while trying to scale this mountain. And it's, and like, there's so many times while playing. And just, a few hours that like I've had a button press go awry and like jumped in a way that I didn't mean to jump and stuff like that classic classic Assassin's Creed yeah that's the old school right and it's kind of like the funny thing about like I know so I think all three of us are really into the new style of Assassin's Creed and then I liked all the old ones too no no no I was gonna I was also going to

say and then Kirk I know you're really into the old ones I jumped it jumped it I was a little bit into the old ones many I'm not sure were you into the old ones. No. Not really. But I think, and I think that there's been, there's this like, um, breed of Assassin's Creed fan that is, that is like looking for, harkening back for the old school style. And playing this, it's kind of like, man, there's a lot of stuff that they really improved upon with the new games. Even if you didn't like how humongous and bloated they were, which is a totally reasonable complaint, there's some stuff they added that like makes the game a lot more interesting and fun, including be able to climb on anything, which is really,

just a big downgrade here. Again, I haven't played a ton, so like there might be stuff about it that I like, I know there's this concept of like, this old school concept of like the black box assassination where you're like presented with a target and you can kind of approach it in a bunch of different ways.

But like, man, so far, I am not really into it, unfortunately. I'm going to play some more because I have to cover it from Bloomberg, so I've been writing about it and I'm hoping to play some more before I can do that. But yeah, Man, bouncing off the first couple hours, unfortunately.

Although I will say, Shorae Agdashlu, right? Is that how I pronounceing that right? The beloved Shiree Agdashli. Yes, she plays a... She is one of the main characters with her beautiful, raspy voice. She is one of the main characters,

and I'm enjoying conversing with her. But Basim himself, man, I liked him in Valhalla, but in this, he's such a, like, flat, like, goody-two shoes, like boring character and I'm curious to see how he evolves because in shoes assassin never been done well he's like yeah I mean he's you're seeing him trained to become he's like a thief at the beginning and blah blah blah blah blah blah and yeah and then like eventually he'll turn into like the

kind of more of a trickster character that he is in valhalla but and I'm curious to see what happens and if I don't it's funny if I don't wind up finishing this I'll probably Google the ending sequence because I'm curious about how it ties into the larger plot since Valhalla, as you guys may or may not remember, has a really intriguing ending involving Basim and, like, him popping up in modern day and, like, what's going to happen there? And so far, there hasn't been any modern day stuff in this, although there are Isu artifacts, but no modern day stuff that I've seen. It just kind of jumps right into Basim. Although Basim has, like, weird visions involving, like, what's his name, William Miles. And so

there's definitely connections to the other game. But yeah, we'll see if I like it more in due time. But right now I'm a little bit down on it, unfortunately. Also, it looks like a PS3 game. It's really, it really, you can tell it's kind of like, yeah, again, it's just very, very much like a return to old Assassin's Creed and look and feel for better and for worse. Nice.

Well, yeah, as an old school, you see how it'll be interested in checking it out one way or another. And, yeah, I'll be interested if you play more, what you think of it. But all right, that'll do it for another episode of Triple Click. Thanks everyone out there for listening. We will be back next week to talk about more video games. And yeah, I'll see the two of you then. See you guys next week. Bye.

Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics. policy in the show notes. Triple click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun

Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpods, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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