Happy Pride month everyone. Which segues into Kotaku writer Claire Jackson as she tells a story of how she used 2077 as a form of therapy. This to help her through a difficult period of her gender transformation. It's raw, it's critical and it is moving as she talks about the main plot of the game and how it mirrored the emotional trials that was happening to her in real life. Here is a snip;
After the early mission “The Heist” kicks things off, the game’s story takes the strangest of turns. Here, V awakens from a mission gone wrong to find out she’s not alone in her head. In Cyberpunk 2077, that additional mental construct is a messed-up former rockstar from whom the world has moved on, zealous in his perspectives on society and completely willing to risk his life for them. It was the kind of person I knew well; it was the kind of person I myself had been before coming out, having traveled the country and other parts of the world playing metal music in venue after venue, night after night.
That extra person, that construct, wanted to take over my brain and push me out, turning me into nothing more than a loud-ass walking stereotype. It was what I had to resist. Am I talking about the game or about how hard it was to finally come out and override my own faux construct? Probably both.
Whenever a friend would ask me what I thought of Cyberpunk 2077, I’d give some variation of the same answer: “It’s a broken game about a broken world where I’m a trans woman with the consciousness of a self-destructive male rockstar stuck in her head and she has to take pills to make him go away.” Anyone to whom I would’ve said this already knew I was trans and knew about my previous life as a touring metal guitarist. There’d usually be a collective moment of silence and an unvoiced, “oh…” in response.