To preface the rest of this blog: I know, I know. I have no idea what I was thinking.
OK, that’s not entirely true. I have some idea of what I was thinking. Ever since Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion released to rave reviews in September, I’ve been giving the base game a second chance after bouncing off it hard in 2020. For the most part, I’ve been having a great time. Between massively improved combat and tremendously lowered expectations, I’ve been able to enjoy the game on its own terms and appreciate what it does well rather than where it falls short. Unsurprisingly, considering that it’s a CD Projekt Red joint, characters have been a high point. Which brings me to my rationale for romancing River Ward, a cop who becomes an ex-cop, only to basically go back to being a cop.
In his pre-romance quest line, River comes across as somebody who’s fed up with the corruption of the Night City Police Department and decides to take matters into his own hands, only to get suspended from the force. During an ensuing personal quest, he effectively ceases to be a cop altogether, making him the only good kind of cop. On top of that, I’m playing as female V, and if I ever decide to replay the game as male V, a River romance would be off limits. Plus – and this part is crucial – I’d heard that Cyberpunk allows you to be non-monogamous if you so choose (at least until the end), and I was interested in exploring that after being disappointed by the options offered even by games that more openly advertise non-monogamy like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Oh, and finally, River is tall and jacked. He’s hot. Meanwhile, I’ve been role-playing V as somebody who’s young and dumb – and also kind of unscrupulous, because otherwise her character doesn’t make much sense from quest to quest and murder to murder. She strikes me as somebody who’d have at least a few regrettable notches in her bedpost.
So I decided to romance River alongside Judy Alvarez, a decidedly anti-establishment technician who creates “braindances,” a means of living other people’s experiences – including emotions and physical sensations – that has a very dumb name. This quickly proved whiplash-inducing. Judy has an edge, but she’s fun, adventurous, and down to overthrow shitty leadership when the situation calls for it. River is… none of those things. He’s nice but plain, a strong silent type who claims to care about family and justice, but who is also a cop. Dating him – as often happens in real life – does not make him any more interesting. The best and perhaps only good thing that has come of the whole arrangement occurred right after V hooked up with River: Johnny Silverhand, the deceased punk rocker living in V’s head due to computer magic, said to me with utter contempt in his voice, made perfect by Keanu Reeves’ delivery: "Christ, V. Can't believe you're makin' me fuck a cop."
Cyberpunk has a cool system where, once you start dating a character (read: after you’ve hooked up), you receive sporadic text messages from them that continue to advance the relationship. But it’s totally wasted on River, whose personality careens wildly between lovestruck puppy dog and Cop, with no middle ground. When the best conversation starter you can muster is, “What should I name my new PI firm,” you need to get a hobby or something.
Judy, by comparison, hits you up about all sorts of stuff: At one point she goes on a drunken bender with friends and texts you a bunch of gushy messages. Later she apologizes for getting a little too rowdy (you can tell her it’s totally fine) and sends you a nice gift. At another point she warns you that her grandmother is going to interrogate you to suss out whether you’re a suitable partner. A few in-game hours later, Judy’s grandmother does, in fact, text you with a barrage of to-the-point questions. I was honest about V’s fraught situation, which Judy’s grandmother respected, and she ended the conversation by telling me she trusted me. The whole thing was very sweet – a flavor of intimacy I rarely see in big-budget video games.
There is also, of course, the elephant in the room: River’s solution to the problem of a blatantly corrupt, murderous police force – with which he has ample personal experience – is to become a private investigator and continue working within the confines of a system he knows is busted. In so many ways, River exemplifies one of the biggest issues I have with Cyberpunk, a game in which characters both important and small-time – with varying degrees of power and influence – all react basically the same way to the pervasive systemic issues they identify: By saying, “Aw well, can’t be helped!” The game’s setting regularly conflates the cynicism of systems designed to entrap people with the people trapped by those systems. It usually does not make a meaningful distinction between the two, even when it comes to supposedly upstanding characters like River.
Cyberpunk also just doesn’t seem to care all that much about River. Given his conflicting motivations, he could have been a little more interesting with some room to breathe. Instead, the game gives River a scant few quests and then relegates him to the role of occasional texter. Other romance options like Judy feature in more than double that number of quests, some of them interlocking with the main story. As a result, Cyberpunk leaves numerous compelling questions on the table: What would a truly disillusioned cop look like in such a heavily militarized setting? What ways, if any, could they find to work outside the system? What causes could they support? Where would they need to make amends for the abominable things they’d done in their old line of work? Which characters would that impact? How could such a situation give agency to characters who don’t normally receive it in an action-oriented triple-A video game? Would there even be redemption for a character like River under such conditions? Should somebody like that seek redemption, or is their only recourse to try to make what’s left of the world a better place, regardless of whether anybody acknowledges their atonement?
Cyberpunk isn’t interested in those questions. It also, as it turns out, is not interested in letting me break up with River, who at this point I feel like I’m just leading on any time I reply to his texts, even with noncommittal answers. I’m not alone: Earlier today I Googled “Cyberpunk break up,” and the second suggested option was “Cyberpunk break up with River.” Unfortunately, unless you tell him you’re not interested in anything serious right after sleeping with him, there does not appear to be a way to put a permanent, decisive end to the relationship.
So I’m doing the next best thing: leaving him on read. Maybe he’ll eventually take the hint? Then again, cops are not exactly great at taking hints, or getting to the bottom of anything, for that matter.
