Minjun S. reviewed Cyberpunk 2077

I ran Cyberpunk 2020 tables for about six years in the nineties, so I had a very specific set of things I wanted from this and got about two thirds of them.

What it nails is the tone. Not the neon — everyone gets the neon right — but the fatalism. 2020 was a game about people with no future making short-term decisions, and the writing here understands that. The gigs are mostly small, grubby and morally unsatisfying in exactly the right way, and the ending you get is never clean.

What it misses is the systems side. Tabletop Cyberpunk was about lifepath, reputation and consequence across sessions. Here lifepath is twenty minutes and a dialogue option, and street cred is a number that unlocks vendors. The fiction understands the source better than the mechanics do.

An A. Best adaptation of a tabletop feel I've played. Not an adaptation of the tabletop game.