As is my tradition, I headed home to Brisbane over the Christmas break again last year. I stayed, as I always do, with my sister and brother-in-law, getting a small window into their day-to-day lives even as the year and its attendant responsibilities wound down. My arrival always heralds a bit of a change in mood within their household, I think. My sister is always working — she’s a freelance photographer by trade, which means many hours spent in front of her Macbook editing images on a tight turnaround. My brother-in-law is a music teacher and a very disciplined man, careful and selective with the things that require his time and focus. He has a habit of denying himself simple pleasures because it frees up the time to do things that matter.
This facet of his personality is why he’s the focus of this story.
Where my presence doesn’t make so much as a dent in my sister’s routine, it seems to give my brother-in-law permission to break his own self-imposed rules. He breaks out the whiskies, beloved and curated drops that sit on his shelf all year, untouched. He’s more willing to get a bite to eat in the city, and not concern himself with what he is eating. He allows himself to slow down, and broaden his focus beyond whatever singular goal may lie ahead.
For his birthday last year, his family gave him an Xbox Series X, a replacement for the aging launch model Xbox One I had handed down to them several years prior. Neither he nor my sister are big gamers. They’d been using that older device as a streaming box, and the Series X likely would have met the same fate. My brother-in-law was more of a gamer in his younger days, but now, in his mid-to-late thirties, like me, he just doesn’t have the time for it anymore. In the rare instances where he could carve out 40 minutes to play a game, anything he wanted to play would invariably need an update that chewed up those precious minutes. Between these updates and a new smart TV relieving it of streaming duties, the Series X had gone largely untouched all year.
I had fired the Xbox up to make sure I could still tick off my Fortnite dailies while on holiday, and I think that act may have reminded him of its existence. A copy of Cyberpunk 2077, gifted with the console, had sat unopened all year, waiting for its moment. Blissfully offline in his daily life, he knew nothing about the Discourse surrounding the game or its disastrous launch. He was still excited to get stuck into it. In the responsibility-free zone between Christmas and the new year, he decided the time had come to fire it up.
Having thrown my back out by turning to grab the handle on my luggage earlier in the trip, a kind of old-man-in-a-sitcom nonsense I’ve never suffered before in my life, I elected to join him (because I was already on the couch and couldn’t move).
Immediately tickled by the notion of the Cool stat, my brother-in-law decided that his character would be Strong and Cool. He had no build in mind at this point. He just thought that was a good jumping-off point for sketching out the character. Very into martial arts as a form of stress relief, the news that making a strong character would help him create a powerful melee build pleased him. Early into his run, he found himself a samurai sword, and a new melee damage vector opened up to him — though it was still never as powerful as his own two fists. This was only compounded by the discovery of the Gorilla Arms strength aug, which delivered a giant return on investment with every upgrade.
I had expected his approach to yield a solid, serviceable build that might help him get by in the early game, but would be respec’d further into the campaign — if he even got that far. I was not expecting it to strike a chord with him. I was not expecting the Strong and Cool melee route to be so powerful it enabled him to finish the campaign in three days.
I hadn’t even expected him to stick with it. For my brother-in-law, playing a game is something one does for a few hours every few months or so. But the joy of the run had gotten under his skin, calling him back to the couch until he saw the story through to its conclusion. The feedback loop of imagining the build and then pursuing it — upgrading, experimenting, understanding the results, and upgrading again — drew him in. The results were silly, yes, but there was a level of discipline required to extract them, and that spoke to him. My brother-in-law’s character tore Cyberpunk 2077 apart with his bare hands. His character was so strong he was triggering specialised dialogue from companion NPCs. After punching a mech three times his size to death, his stunned companion stammered, “D-did you just destroy that thing with your…? You’re a madman.”
Over three compressed days of long, unbroken play, he created a monster, seeking out upgrades for the Gorilla Arms aug and hunting down more powerful samurai swords he could use to buttress his attacks. Every upgrade was followed by a casual test on the nearest unsuspecting NPC, accompanied by exultant laughter as the DPS bell curve began to blow out. He was having fun. With Cyberpunk 2077. He was enjoying the kind of run we’d all hoped to enjoy before the game had launched, unfinished and falling apart at the seams.
As I watched him rip Night City limb from limb, I began to think to myself: maybe it’s time I replayed Cyberpunk 2077. If not perfect, the game seemed like it was in much better shape, and the Series X version felt fairly stable. But the longer I watched, the more I wondered if I even needed to go to the trouble. Why would I replay it myself when I was watching a perfect, gleeful run play out in front of me? A run so deeply enjoyable that I would never be able to replicate it with the dull, slow “sneak and hack” build I knew I would inevitably create for myself. My brother-in-law had effortlessly created the best version of Cyberpunk 2077 for himself — a vision of a hacker-filled future where V is too strong and cool to know how to use a computer. Who needs to know how to hack someone’s augs when you can punch them so hard all their blood comes out?
In the end, he killed Adam Smasher in about seven blows, and took the surname for himself like a wrestler hoisting a championship belt aloft. I can’t beat that experience. I know I can’t improve on that. But here’s what could take away from it — sometimes, it’s way more fun to play a strong, cool moron than it is to indulge in the precise type of power fantasy a game is selling. With a great many new RPGs on the horizon, I’ll try to bear that lesson in mind this year.
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