Finally, a video game that can give me an escapist fantasy away from the horrors of living in Birmingham by transporting me to a dystopic city with a corrupt bankrupt government entirely dependent on corporations to function. Why does this feel familiar?
A friend recommended this video to me. I admittedly had it playing on my phone while playing a game on the side. After I finished watching the video, I was surprised to see the number of views and subs. I had thought it'd be hundreds, if not thousands, of times larger. Loved your video and editing style, more people need to see this. And this is coming from someone who hasn't even played or seen Cyberpunk 2077 outside of the initial trailers and hype.
"you can't just review the game, you also have to review the discourse around it, you have to review the genre of cyberpunk, you have to review the world we live it, you have to review yourself, and then you have to touch grass." yep sounds like a Tim Rogers video alright
This video was fantastic. It was funny, bitting, and surprisingly emotional. I will now judge every game based on it’s New Vegasness. I’ll admit, I did watch this on my phone, but I’m also incapable of multitasking. While I’d love to see another video, this also makes a great finale. Hope the grass feels good wherever you go
45:01 In the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime the protagonist David receives his mother's ashes via vending machine at a discount crematory after she died because she didn't have good health insurance. It would be cool if in the game you actually had to pay a fee to keep your cyberware or a repo man comes and takes it
14:16 This entire section is gold, you've hit the nail on the head for so many lame FPSRPGAAAnonGMO games these days. Btw I came here from your Trashfuture animations on Trash Heap, imo you should link both channels in the description. You've some great content mate, keep it up!
Thank you! Yeah I'm in the weird position now where my side channel for shitposts has turned into something more legit than the main one lol. I'll get my branding straight at some point!
I loved this video from beginning to end. Been watching since the Disco Elysium vid and I have to say that your video essays are underrated. As a person who is trying to learn video editing to do some essays as well, I must say you are a great inspiration. I think you're quite creative both to convey your talking points not only coming from a objective point of view (talking about mechanics) but also speaking from the gut, talking about what the game made you feel. I guess I could say that I like your videos because they're a mixed bag. In **clap** my **clap** opinion. Edit: I hope for you a well deserved break. I want to create essays as a hobby and not as work too, without a mind numbing set of numbers talking about performance boggling my mind.
Thank you very much! Yeah I've tried to post more consistently this year to please the algorithm, but I think a break and touching some grass is in order now haha
Liked it a month back and finally came back to see the end. It was absolutely worth it and had me once again deeply impressed with your ability to go beyond your initial focus and make it neatly connect with underlying vibes. Maybe the dual subwaysurfers gameplay footage hooked me by the adhd, maybe hearing an older man validate my feelings in a british accent feels comfy. Whatever, I'm here for it.
I am a big fan of Cyberpunk 2077. The story and characters, mostly. I play on Xbox One, so the gameplay is still pretty bad because of the bugs. But I really liked the video, despite not agreeing on a good bit of the stuff you said. I agree that Cyberpunk, the genre and game, doesn't really says a lot about the world despite "blah blah blah, capitalism bad". Instead, I think that, thanks to it's characters, enviroment and side quests, the game shows us how to cope in a world like this. It doesn't want to give a solution to today's problems, or analyze it thoroughly, just show how different people deal with it in different ways. I saw this on another review on the game, I don't remember which one, exactly, but one of the main questions the game makes us ask is "would you rather live in peace, or die in a blaze of glory?". It just resonates with me, for some reason. I am graduating from high school this year, so maybe it has something to do with that? Anyway, I think that the game tells us to cope with the modern world by helping each other, making friends, loving, being sad, happy, etc. Just try to be human. And I am aware it's quite cliche, but I just feel like the characters are well written (at least) enough to make that message meaneful, and it isn't a "love will solve everything" kind of deal. On the game design aspect, I don't have a lot to say despite that I felt really immersed when playing in 2022 (the first playthrough in a playable state I did), like the world, characters and plot mattered enough for me to worry about V going to their house and sleeping. I haven't finished the game yet, and I'm trying to not get spoilers, so I still have to analyze the whole picture of the game's plot (and I skipped a pary of the story recap for the same reason), so maybe I am not in the most adequate position to "review" the game. And I surely haven't been trying to review it for one year like you did, but I just feel this game says something special. I don't quite know how to explain it, so maybe I just liked it and didn't think a whole lot about it, who knows, my education was a mixed bag as well. Anyway, the review was really good (also I may have done some writing mistakes, english isn't my first language) Tl;dr it's okay, I guess 👍
The last monologue hit really deep. I'm one of those tech enthusiasts, programming, living on the internet, constantly overstimulated, bored and disappointed by friendships and relationships. Tech doesn't make me happy but it provides a distraction from the unfulfilling life out there. Even though I study biology Im intensely bored by nature, cant cope with the silence. Prospects of my labour being exploited, the Climate getting fucked, Democracy crumbling and Fascism rising, men and women hating eachother, People becoming more anti-intellectual and adopting opinions from private media... its all filling me with dread, a hatred for the world, despair and a loss of hope from seeing nothing improves. Very fucking cyberpunk
Yet another good video! Honestly, having played the patched version for a bunch now, the only thing that's really different is the numbersiness. In my experience, it's like a better shooty type game now, the rpg-y combat mechanics are better, as long as one is fine with level scaling. I guess for me, what has made the game worth playing, aside from the good feeling murder bits, is the character writing. I feel like lot of the characters are fun to hang out with. Johnny is like basically a 1 note angrysmug asshole, but that angrysmug assholiness is just funny to follow. Many of the other characters are just likeable too. The only bit I majorly disagree about is the AI angle, not because I think chatgpt is gonna become a cyber god or anything, but because I think those philosophical questions are interesting, and I very much doubt there's any magic going on inside people's brains. For as little as we know about the brain, it's still like 100% stuff and goo. I absolutely find the kinda pseudoreligious way Musk and his fans go about tech and AI as stupid and harmful and think the current AI boom is essentially just trying to do crypto again, but I just find the categorical "nah" at the possibility of computer sentience to be silly. As for the cyberpunk genre, it absolutely has two forms: there's the smart form that's about free will and feedback loops and capitalism and all kinds of stuff, and then there's the two-dimensional and often super orientalist 80s aesthetic thing with essentially nothing to say. But like, the smart form is still pretty goofy and dumb: even when it's about cybernetic systems and feedback loops and stuff, it's also about absolute and total maximalism and unsubtlety and throwing wild guesses at the wall. And more often than not, it's still really really orientalist.
Also, it kept bugging me, so I'm back for one more thing: the "let disabled people write cyberpunk" tweet is bad. Like, the smart stuff, including the exact themes she's alluding to, having been a part of the genre from the very beginning, just alongside the pulp and goofy stuff. Big C cyberpunk is arguably kinda bad about disabilities tho: the "cyberpsychosis" mechanic / narrative is just bad. And hell, that system was supposedly originally a cyberware license system, until publisher meddling.
you do know that hacking isn’t the only play style right? you have cyberware that slows time like the matrix and another one that makes you basically invincible
Your video gave me an existential crisis about the state of the world & I can't go touch grass because my garden was concreted over by the landlord. Love the content though in all seriousness, thanks for all the effort you put into it ♥
I stopped at 24 minutes just to say you're nailing every single problem I had with Cyberpunk 2077 but couldn't articulate well since it's such a bizarre mish-mash of systems. You're completely right in that it is "The most game of all time", every mechanic in this thing is always a stone throw away from being something truly beautiful, but it always stops cause it has to do so many other things. Great video!
What's the music in 9:52 ? For some reason it reminds me of Age of Mythology, but I don't know. Also, great video that deserves more views, The TH-cam algorithm has something against you.
Thanks! It's a cover I made for my Blood Money video of "Vegas" from that game's soundtrack. Yep lol, me and the algorithm don't see eye-to-eye but I'm not too bothered by it
I come at this from a very different perspective. I had no gaming system for a long, long time and was out of the loop about big abticipated games, and I didn't finally play this until earlier this year with the first couple updates that fixed stuff. So I didn't have the super disappointed everyone had at launch. Thought it was pretty okay and I had fun using my super Net Runner powers to explode people's heads. Phantom Liberty is pretty fun so far as well. One thing I absolutely disliked was how the choice of Corpo/Street Kid/Nomad literally didn't matter except for the prologuge and some dialogue options. Not even a unique side quest for each option!
You're gonna hate this, Scrap, but Covid makes you sound like the pawn shop guy from Disco Elysium. On a totally unrelated note, I loved the video. Also, I still listen to your Dico Elysium OST covers on a regular basis. I think that's all, hope you have a good one!
@@ScrapTakes I mean it in the best of ways, pawn shop guy is one of my favourite NPCs in the game :) feeling the part about touching grass recently, maybe that's part of going into your 30s in the world we live in and trying not to drown. I truly wish you the best!
Honestly it’s kinda tiring hearing people keep complaining about the games past. It’s treading the same topic over and over again. I’ve played CP2077 for the first time this year and thought the experience was amazing. I wish reviewers would focus on how the game is now with complaining about the past.
While I mostly disagree with you about the game (I guess I'm a fanboy), I loved hearing your thoughts about it. Please keep making videos, I'm sure the algorithm will bless your channel at some point :)
Love your videos, the stream of consciousness style, snappy edits, and self-aware within video essays as a genre, really puts these a cut above all the others. Very excited to see what you do in your future videos. You thought about doing a video on Norco?
genuinely, for someone who doesn’t give a shit about game bugs or FPS, the game was fun as hell to play. World was fun, 2.0 made it better, in my personal opinion though they did seriously fuck up the materials and money system.
i left a comment on this the other day, can't tell if you deleted it(?), or youtube ate it or something - but for the sake of algorithmic support: cool video bro
The point near the start about the devs trying to work on tech-pushing stuff *while* making a game makes me wonder why they didn't just make tech-demos for all of that, _then_ make the game?
I know I'm a little late to the party but I had to chime in. Cyberpunk has become style over substance long ago, and it is now just an aesthetic to drape over any kind of plot you want to use. But the origins of cyberpunk did address the problems you pointed out. The world is on fire but nobody cares, those that do care are powerless, everyone just wants to escape one way or the other. And yes, it is silly sometimes, because you have to laugh or you'll go mad. But readers were too preoccupied with the flying cars and the cybernetics and the brain jacks and the guns and the swordfights and 1337 h4X0rz with cool spiky hair to notice or bother with the underlying themes, and now cyberpunk is just fashion.
I throughly enjoyed the story/writing. Tho i am biased as i love a "cinematic" feel in my games. Like GOWR had very cinematic combat and i loved that. Id also just lost my dad and this game deals with grief very well. Good vid tho my g
Finally, a video game that can give me an escapist fantasy away from the horrors of living in Birmingham by transporting me to a dystopic city with a corrupt bankrupt government entirely dependent on corporations to function. Why does this feel familiar?
Getting my brain infected with a biochip engram of Stewart Lee
yeah, but does Birmingham have cool robot arms?
y’all niggas think you got it bad, gonna admit you do.
but in the US we got all that, an we getting shot at.
A friend recommended this video to me. I admittedly had it playing on my phone while playing a game on the side.
After I finished watching the video, I was surprised to see the number of views and subs. I had thought it'd be hundreds, if not thousands, of times larger. Loved your video and editing style, more people need to see this. And this is coming from someone who hasn't even played or seen Cyberpunk 2077 outside of the initial trailers and hype.
Thanks for giving this long-ass video a chance, glad you liked it 😁
"you can't just review the game, you also have to review the discourse around it, you have to review the genre of cyberpunk, you have to review the world we live it, you have to review yourself, and then you have to touch grass." yep sounds like a Tim Rogers video alright
I had to mention Tim right up front bc he looms large in the whole video lol
So many great jokes in this video.
"Sorry, it looks like we had a glitch. We'll patch that out later."
No patches necessary, this is incredible. Is it too early to call it a masterpiece?
Haha never too early for that 😉 Thank you so much!
This video was fantastic. It was funny, bitting, and surprisingly emotional. I will now judge every game based on it’s New Vegasness. I’ll admit, I did watch this on my phone, but I’m also incapable of multitasking.
While I’d love to see another video, this also makes a great finale. Hope the grass feels good wherever you go
I guess you could say it's a mixed bag
45:01 In the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime the protagonist David receives his mother's ashes via vending machine at a discount crematory after she died because she didn't have good health insurance.
It would be cool if in the game you actually had to pay a fee to keep your cyberware or a repo man comes and takes it
While it would be cool for the cyberpunk it wouldn't be cool for the game.
14:16 This entire section is gold, you've hit the nail on the head for so many lame FPSRPGAAAnonGMO games these days. Btw I came here from your Trashfuture animations on Trash Heap, imo you should link both channels in the description. You've some great content mate, keep it up!
Thank you! Yeah I'm in the weird position now where my side channel for shitposts has turned into something more legit than the main one lol. I'll get my branding straight at some point!
I loved this video from beginning to end. Been watching since the Disco Elysium vid and I have to say that your video essays are underrated. As a person who is trying to learn video editing to do some essays as well, I must say you are a great inspiration. I think you're quite creative both to convey your talking points not only coming from a objective point of view (talking about mechanics) but also speaking from the gut, talking about what the game made you feel. I guess I could say that I like your videos because they're a mixed bag.
In **clap** my **clap** opinion.
Edit: I hope for you a well deserved break. I want to create essays as a hobby and not as work too, without a mind numbing set of numbers talking about performance boggling my mind.
Thank you very much! Yeah I've tried to post more consistently this year to please the algorithm, but I think a break and touching some grass is in order now haha
Liked it a month back and finally came back to see the end. It was absolutely worth it and had me once again deeply impressed with your ability to go beyond your initial focus and make it neatly connect with underlying vibes. Maybe the dual subwaysurfers gameplay footage hooked me by the adhd, maybe hearing an older man validate my feelings in a british accent feels comfy. Whatever, I'm here for it.
Its a action shooter with a lot of smoke and mirrors. Also the story is very mid and sometimes very cringe.
🙄
its amazing how your content is actually SSS+ tier and still has low views. Love the editing and wit here
I am a big fan of Cyberpunk 2077. The story and characters, mostly. I play on Xbox One, so the gameplay is still pretty bad because of the bugs. But I really liked the video, despite not agreeing on a good bit of the stuff you said. I agree that Cyberpunk, the genre and game, doesn't really says a lot about the world despite "blah blah blah, capitalism bad". Instead, I think that, thanks to it's characters, enviroment and side quests, the game shows us how to cope in a world like this. It doesn't want to give a solution to today's problems, or analyze it thoroughly, just show how different people deal with it in different ways.
I saw this on another review on the game, I don't remember which one, exactly, but one of the main questions the game makes us ask is "would you rather live in peace, or die in a blaze of glory?". It just resonates with me, for some reason. I am graduating from high school this year, so maybe it has something to do with that? Anyway, I think that the game tells us to cope with the modern world by helping each other, making friends, loving, being sad, happy, etc. Just try to be human. And I am aware it's quite cliche, but I just feel like the characters are well written (at least) enough to make that message meaneful, and it isn't a "love will solve everything" kind of deal.
On the game design aspect, I don't have a lot to say despite that I felt really immersed when playing in 2022 (the first playthrough in a playable state I did), like the world, characters and plot mattered enough for me to worry about V going to their house and sleeping. I haven't finished the game yet, and I'm trying to not get spoilers, so I still have to analyze the whole picture of the game's plot (and I skipped a pary of the story recap for the same reason), so maybe I am not in the most adequate position to "review" the game. And I surely haven't been trying to review it for one year like you did, but I just feel this game says something special. I don't quite know how to explain it, so maybe I just liked it and didn't think a whole lot about it, who knows, my education was a mixed bag as well.
Anyway, the review was really good (also I may have done some writing mistakes, english isn't my first language)
Tl;dr it's okay, I guess 👍
The last monologue hit really deep. I'm one of those tech enthusiasts, programming, living on the internet, constantly overstimulated, bored and disappointed by friendships and relationships. Tech doesn't make me happy but it provides a distraction from the unfulfilling life out there. Even though I study biology Im intensely bored by nature, cant cope with the silence. Prospects of my labour being exploited, the Climate getting fucked, Democracy crumbling and Fascism rising, men and women hating eachother, People becoming more anti-intellectual and adopting opinions from private media... its all filling me with dread, a hatred for the world, despair and a loss of hope from seeing nothing improves. Very fucking cyberpunk
Im so glad I found your channel through the disco review because your content is extremely vibrant and entertaining!
This video was quite deep. Loved every sec of it.
I still can't play this game because I'm waiting on a realistic combat mod to be updated to 2.0.
...anyway, good video. Great job.
Yet another good video! Honestly, having played the patched version for a bunch now, the only thing that's really different is the numbersiness. In my experience, it's like a better shooty type game now, the rpg-y combat mechanics are better, as long as one is fine with level scaling.
I guess for me, what has made the game worth playing, aside from the good feeling murder bits, is the character writing. I feel like lot of the characters are fun to hang out with. Johnny is like basically a 1 note angrysmug asshole, but that angrysmug assholiness is just funny to follow. Many of the other characters are just likeable too.
The only bit I majorly disagree about is the AI angle, not because I think chatgpt is gonna become a cyber god or anything, but because I think those philosophical questions are interesting, and I very much doubt there's any magic going on inside people's brains. For as little as we know about the brain, it's still like 100% stuff and goo. I absolutely find the kinda pseudoreligious way Musk and his fans go about tech and AI as stupid and harmful and think the current AI boom is essentially just trying to do crypto again, but I just find the categorical "nah" at the possibility of computer sentience to be silly.
As for the cyberpunk genre, it absolutely has two forms: there's the smart form that's about free will and feedback loops and capitalism and all kinds of stuff, and then there's the two-dimensional and often super orientalist 80s aesthetic thing with essentially nothing to say. But like, the smart form is still pretty goofy and dumb: even when it's about cybernetic systems and feedback loops and stuff, it's also about absolute and total maximalism and unsubtlety and throwing wild guesses at the wall. And more often than not, it's still really really orientalist.
Also, it kept bugging me, so I'm back for one more thing: the "let disabled people write cyberpunk" tweet is bad. Like, the smart stuff, including the exact themes she's alluding to, having been a part of the genre from the very beginning, just alongside the pulp and goofy stuff. Big C cyberpunk is arguably kinda bad about disabilities tho: the "cyberpsychosis" mechanic / narrative is just bad. And hell, that system was supposedly originally a cyberware license system, until publisher meddling.
you do know that hacking isn’t the only play style right? you have cyberware that slows time like the matrix and another one that makes you basically invincible
how dare you know I'm playing Starfield right now as I watch.
Your video gave me an existential crisis about the state of the world & I can't go touch grass because my garden was concreted over by the landlord.
Love the content though in all seriousness, thanks for all the effort you put into it ♥
Thanks! Haha I do like inspiring existential crises, sorry for the negative vibes
I stopped at 24 minutes just to say you're nailing every single problem I had with Cyberpunk 2077 but couldn't articulate well since it's such a bizarre mish-mash of systems. You're completely right in that it is "The most game of all time", every mechanic in this thing is always a stone throw away from being something truly beautiful, but it always stops cause it has to do so many other things. Great video!
What's the music in 9:52 ? For some reason it reminds me of Age of Mythology, but I don't know. Also, great video that deserves more views, The TH-cam algorithm has something against you.
Thanks! It's a cover I made for my Blood Money video of "Vegas" from that game's soundtrack. Yep lol, me and the algorithm don't see eye-to-eye but I'm not too bothered by it
The use of that incredibly annoying artificial tiktok voice to read quotes is such a great choice
Great video to ocassionaly look at when working on my second screen.
u r literally funniest gamer alive
I come at this from a very different perspective. I had no gaming system for a long, long time and was out of the loop about big abticipated games, and I didn't finally play this until earlier this year with the first couple updates that fixed stuff. So I didn't have the super disappointed everyone had at launch.
Thought it was pretty okay and I had fun using my super Net Runner powers to explode people's heads.
Phantom Liberty is pretty fun so far as well.
One thing I absolutely disliked was how the choice of Corpo/Street Kid/Nomad literally didn't matter except for the prologuge and some dialogue options. Not even a unique side quest for each option!
There are unique side quests, but they are quite short. As a nomad, there is a quest to get your old car back, for example.
great vid plz keep making more!!!!!!!!!!!
You're gonna hate this, Scrap, but Covid makes you sound like the pawn shop guy from Disco Elysium.
On a totally unrelated note, I loved the video. Also, I still listen to your Dico Elysium OST covers on a regular basis. I think that's all, hope you have a good one!
That's ok, I'm used to comparisons lol. Thank you 😊
@@ScrapTakes I mean it in the best of ways, pawn shop guy is one of my favourite NPCs in the game :) feeling the part about touching grass recently, maybe that's part of going into your 30s in the world we live in and trying not to drown. I truly wish you the best!
sir scrap thank u for this content.
Always love to see a new video from ya!
Now this is video games
Honestly it’s kinda tiring hearing people keep complaining about the games past. It’s treading the same topic over and over again. I’ve played CP2077 for the first time this year and thought the experience was amazing. I wish reviewers would focus on how the game is now with complaining about the past.
While I mostly disagree with you about the game (I guess I'm a fanboy), I loved hearing your thoughts about it. Please keep making videos, I'm sure the algorithm will bless your channel at some point :)
Love your videos, the stream of consciousness style, snappy edits, and self-aware within video essays as a genre, really puts these a cut above all the others. Very excited to see what you do in your future videos. You thought about doing a video on Norco?
Cyberpunk was able to make me depress with its Story
that not even TLOU2 could
Scrap thanks for the videos. Seriously , I've been impressed with the quality of your content. But if you don't continue, i understand.
It feels like we ended up in a cyberpunk setting where none of us can make enough of a difference to qualify as protagonists/player characters.
I appreciate you for making this video, bro.
genuinely, for someone who doesn’t give a shit about game bugs or FPS, the game was fun as hell to play. World was fun, 2.0 made it better, in my personal opinion though they did seriously fuck up the materials and money system.
The ending of this video really hit home. It’s hard to focus on normal things when the world is collapsing around us.
you blur your OW2 name in one section of the video but not later in the video
i left a comment on this the other day, can't tell if you deleted it(?), or youtube ate it or something - but for the sake of algorithmic support: cool video bro
Yeah I don't think it came up for me, but thank you for the algorithm-boosting!
I wonder why this video didn't end up unlisted ??!
Fantastic video as always, keep up the great work!
i think this guys education was a mixed bag
holy fuck this was strong.
Another banger video. What's your PC spec, out of curiosity? We shouldn't need a £4,000 PC to play Cyberpunk and have it not looking like a potato
Thanks very much! I only play on PS5 actually, really can't be bothered with the expense and complexity of PC building
@@ScrapTakes honestly don't blame you lol
Trashfuture, good taste in podcasts.
Ah, a fellow Hog!
The point near the start about the devs trying to work on tech-pushing stuff *while* making a game makes me wonder why they didn't just make tech-demos for all of that, _then_ make the game?
I know I'm a little late to the party but I had to chime in.
Cyberpunk has become style over substance long ago, and it is now just an aesthetic to drape over any kind of plot you want to use. But the origins of cyberpunk did address the problems you pointed out. The world is on fire but nobody cares, those that do care are powerless, everyone just wants to escape one way or the other. And yes, it is silly sometimes, because you have to laugh or you'll go mad.
But readers were too preoccupied with the flying cars and the cybernetics and the brain jacks and the guns and the swordfights and 1337 h4X0rz with cool spiky hair to notice or bother with the underlying themes, and now cyberpunk is just fashion.
I'd say cyberpunk 2077 is embodies the genre very well not just its astetic
I throughly enjoyed the story/writing. Tho i am biased as i love a "cinematic" feel in my games. Like GOWR had very cinematic combat and i loved that.
Id also just lost my dad and this game deals with grief very well. Good vid tho my g