CyberPsycho Side-Quest Sad-Fun ActionTimes: Cyberpunk 2077
There was not a single instance of a cross-dressing, cybernetically enhanced, disturbed young man wearing his mother’s clothes and killing someone in a shower set to dramatic violin music. Obviously, I was disappointed.
The lack of an easy Hitchcock reference aside, the Cyberpsycho side-quest mission known as “Psycho Killer” in Cyberpunk 2077 has been more than a satisfying world-building exercise, and as I began to reach the end of the quest there was a general sadness and not just because the mission was done and I would have to resume finding rogue AI controlled taxis for Delamain.
In Cyberpunk 2077 there are numerous side-quests that often take the form of “jobs” or “gigs.” The latter option are jobs involving “fixers” and these are non-playable characters(npcs) that operate in one of the “regions” of Night City or the Bad Lands. Once a player is in walking distance of the trigger location for a Gig, V will will suddenly get a videocall from one of these Fixers who will offer V the gig. If the player accepts then they will receive a text message with further details about the nature of the gig and what needs to be done. Gigs by themselves are designed to provide the player with exercises to flex their grasp of in-game controls and often provide narrative flavor to the game outside of the main storyline.
They also provide loot.
And experience points.
And to make sure some programmer didn’t crunch for 180 hours straight just for you to not explore the region they missed their kid’s birthday for.
Psycho-Killer begins when V steps out of their apartment and is contacted by the fixer and former journalist Regina Jones. Jones tells V that she’s looking into the matter of something called Psyber-Psychosis which appears to be affecting citizens of Night City seemingly at random. Jones confesses that she suspects there is a deeper story here and hires V to investigate instances of psyber-psycho activity, and to non-lethally take-down victims of this psychological disease. Jones’s goal is to ultimately help these people, as well as expose the corporations and organizations that are causing this ailment.
There are 17 Cyberpsychos and I want to take a moment to appreciate that CD Projekt Red chose a prime number. Not enough videogame missions employ prime numbers beyond 3 or 7, to say nothing of the multitudinous even numbered mission assignments. While I’m on that subject did you know that 17 is the sum of the first four prime numbers (2,3,5, & 7), and that it’s also what’s known as a “sexy prime number.” Apparently numbers are sexy, and I owe mathematicians an apology.
I’m sorry, Mathematicians.
There, I said it. Now stop sending me word problems and start sending me math-based videogames damn it!
Each of the cyberpsychos that V encounters will offer their own unique challenge, and this variety is a way to not only familiarize the player with in-game mechanics, but also to flesh out the cyberpunk aesthetic and narrative.
I’ll look at one of them and flesh this out.
Approaching the first Cyberpsycho was easy enough, and honestly speaking I stumbled across it rather than looking for it. It’s kind of hard to miss three cop cars with lights on while members of the NCPD were just standing around talking to each other, but Regina Jones called while I walked closer and the gig started. She told me there was an incident, several security officers were downed, and now NCPD were trying to lock down the area and take out the threat. The player learns that the cyberpsycho is a character named Lt. Mower, a former Militech soldier.
Defeating Lt. Mower involves V fighting in a small pool of water that Mower will often send electricity through before dashing forward and attacking V either with bladed weapons or firearms. Immediately the player is given the challenge and offered several ways to neutralize the threat. V could simply shoot Mower until her HP drains and she falls to the grown incapacitated. But, at the same time players may decide to play using hand-held blades or blunt objects in which case they will have to strike Mowers until she collapses. According to a guide on IGN, players could also easily neutralize Mower by using what are known as quickhacks. This is, for clarification, the most “cyberpunky” tool that the player has access to because it basically allows the player to infect enemy npcs with computer viruses. These quickhacks can result in any number of effects from setting enemies on fire, removing their ability to see, infecting them with viruses that then move to any nearby npcs that are also threats, and the most relevant for the fight against Mower is temporary shutting off cybernetic enhancements.
The point is that the player can decide for themselves, or role-play their tactical approach to the fight.
They can also decide whether or not to kill the cyberpsychos.
The goal of the mission is to take them alive, and most of them will become stunned once their HP hits zero. The player can strike downed enemies with guns, knives, or bats and kill them but this results in fewer rewards, and also several passive aggressive text messages from Jones.
Once the the fight against Lt. Mower is done the next mechanic begins because the point of the mission is not just taking Cyberpsychos down, it’s also about investigating what has caused this behavior in the first place.
At this point the “verb” of the side-mission shifts from “fight” to “investigate.”
V’s cybernetic enhancements allow her to scan for unique elements around the sight of the previous fight, and anything relevant to Lt. Mower will appear coated in a golden-orange texture. The scanning feature is, if I’m being honest, one of my favorite features of the game because it feels like a perfect moment of capturing the aesthetic. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that sensationalizes the advancement of technology in relation to the human body in this new world while also making it feel so commonplace. V can, and will, scan everything from people, doors, cars, vending machines, security cameras, robots, buildings, advertisements, holograms, and the list goes on and on. On a design level this continual scanning gives the player a second sight letting them observe beneath the surface of the grimey and neon lit world to see how much connection and hardware is wired into every pore of Night City. Likewise, the mechanic of scanning becomes so commonplace it’s easy to forget the benefit it gives V until they encounter enemies like Netrunners who will try to use this ability themselves against her.
Also I say her because I chose to play the female V character because I usually prefer to play as women in videogames. Also because I wanted to romance Judy Alvarez.
If you listen quietly you can hear my girlfriend roll her eyes as I write that sentence.
Back to the “verbs.”
“Investigating” the scene V will discover munitions cases, dead bodies, and eventually a “chip” which provides recorded communications that reveal that Lt. Mower was losing control of herself due to excessive cybernetic enhancements. Militech, the private army force that formerly employed her and gave her these upgrades informed her that she was likely too far gone and that they would probably have to neutralize her, a.k.a. kill her. She protested, insisting that she simply needed more drugs to control the impulses at which point they responded by informing her that they would take good care of her and asked her to meet them at a hidden location.
Anyone with a bit of common sense would be able to determine this was a setup; Lt. Mower was never supposed to survive.
At this point V can message Jones, send the data, and begin searching for more Cyberpsychos.
This was a long summary of the mission, and I’ll be honest summaries of events in stories or videogames tend to make my skin crawl. This is partly the effect of spending almost a decade in school writing analytical essays about various works of literature. I was taught to avoid summary at all costs because it afforded little real content for papers. And on a personal level I still agree with this. Summarizing the events of a videogame feels a lot like padding my work with cotton candy: it implodes just as quickly as it makes contact.
Despite my qualms, this summary is important because not everyone has played the videogames I’m writing about. Some people, in fact, will never play Cyberpunk 2077, either because they can’t afford the hardware necessary to play it, or because they have no interest. I hope then my lengthy summary hasn’t lost my reader by this point.
I promise, from this point on I’ll focus on the fun stuff, a.k.a. the rhetorical analysis.
I believe the socially acceptable response to these words is: “Aw, yeah.”
From a mechanical standpoint Lt. Mower’s mission is largely a combat encounter, and every cyberpsycho will fight V before being neutralized. But as I noted before with the “verbs,” every one of these side-quests will employ multiple mechanics. The player has to “explore” Night City to find the right trigger site to que the Cyberpsycho to spawn, they will have to “fight” in order to neutralize the target, they will need to “investigate” the scenes of the attacks, and in some instances they will need to “quickhack” chips, machines, or nearby structures to actually unlock the necessary data to complete the mission and figure out what has actually happened to these people.
Cyberpunk 2077’s “verbs” (which for clarification is a term I’m borrowing from videogame creator and critic Tim Rogers) are wonderfully crafted because they shift fluidly within missions, and don’t become so overused that they overshadow one another. I recognise that there has been plenty of criticism about Cyberpunk 2077 (plenty of it warranted(most of it being petty bullsnot)) and to be fair I recognise that the “Quickhack” ability can make fights unnecessary if I invest in the right skill tree and cycbernetic enhancements. But for the majority of Psycho Killer the verbs maintained a healthy balance because of the design that went into each mission. Some required the verb “fight” more than others, but some later missions like the Cyberpsycho who has a sniper nest on a battered and rusted electrical tower also required the verb “sneak.” And some tend to lean heavily on the verbs “hack” and “investigate” as some missions involve following clues to lead them to the site of Cyberpsycho, and others will require “hacking” to reveal background information.
In short, the designs of Psycho Killer are structured to help players master mechanics.
And then there’s the narrative itself.
Throughout the main story and side quests of Cyberpunk 2077 I was reminded that one of the defining qualities of the genre is a growing perception of hopelessness. Massive corporations infect every level of society with products that determine the quality of life, and for every molecule of neon in the signs that advertise cola with ludicrously sexual advertising not but a stone’s throw away is someone lying on the sidewalk writhing in pain. There are blocks of Night City that I walk through that are littered with trash, sometimes small mountains of plastic bags shoved against concrete barriers or even just left out and about. And as I walk through the city the endless sea of pedestrians nearly everyone has some manner of cybernetic enhancements from a few bits of chrome appearing on their face, to entire arms and legs replaced with brilliant or rusted artificial limbs. Night City is the realm of science fiction imagining where the lines between biology and technology merge constantly, and a capitalist superstructure has pushed this line all in the interest of capital.
Put another way: Night City is a Capitalist Nightmare and human life is about as cheap as replacing your arms. That isn’t hyperbole either, at some point the player will stumble across whole buckets filled with robotic arms. I literally found one of these buckets in the bathroom of a nightclub.
In the midst of the unregulated, hedonistic madness Cyberpsychosis emerges, and the game explains this disease as a psychological condition where human beings who have been subjected to excessive enhancements have steadily lost their sanity as the line between human and machine blurs. Each of the people V tracks down are revealed to have been normal human beings who have steadily begun to lost their connection to society, other people, their own families, and even their own selves.
But the truly heartbreaking component of all of this was the sheer apathy of the outside world.
As I progressed, and read chip after chip I became aware that each of the Cyberpsychos had tried to reach out to someone before completely slipping into the weight of their disease. Lt. Mower had tried to reach out to Militech for support, and instead she became a liability.
Side Quests in videogames serve the function of providing the player with a chance to further explore the world, flex their knowledge of in-game controls, and also provide a way to subtly build the narrative of the world the player occupies. Psycho Killer succeeds beautifully in this endeavor because by the end of the mission I understood more of the world of Night City, while also adopting new strategies for combat and exploration. Rather than simply provide a way for me to kill time, Psycho Killer gave me a glimpse into this dystopian world where commerce, biology, and technology were being recklessly exploited and twisted for the sake of profit. And as I progressed this apathy became a constant environmental component of the narrative.
Cyberpunk as a genre has always attempted to explore how individual people fight, and often break, under the weight of the overwhelming power structures that govern their society, and Cyberpunk 2077 continually succeeds in employing this trope. V is a woman trying to survive in a world that is apathetic to her existence, and as she attempts to help Jones determine what it is that’s breaking these human beings she’s continually finding apathy from corporations, police forces, and average citizens who are trying to navigate their own way through this world that doesn’t seem to care about them outside of their potential to be consumers of products.
And so again I note as I did at the start of this essay that, by the end of this Side-Quest I was rather sad.
It’s a cliche, but the opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy. And this cliche rings true because even in hate I can find reason to care for another person.
Lt. Mower was a woman who was trying to maintain a connection to a system which had given her life purpose. The system in turn reduced her to an asset, and abandoned her once she became an inconvenience.
While researching for this essay I tried desperately to find anything online (be it writing or video) that observed or examined this side-quest and the narrative implication of how the apathy and technology was failing these people. Instead I was met with an endless series of guides on how to trigger missions, how best to take down particular cyberpsychos, what objects to look for, and even a subreddit post that was mostly just players complaining about a bug in this mission. I understand why a majority of the online content for this videogame would be mostly guides, that’s simply the reality of popular videogame journalism and content. And given the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is still(as of this writing) a new and popular game most players looking for information are far more likely to be people looking for guides.
And in the interest of full disclosure, I’m not above this either. I regularly consult Google when I run into a metaphorical brick wall and don’t know how to progress. I want, and need, to make that clear: there’s nothing wrong with consulting online guides when playing a videogame.
However, the reality that players were more concerned with finding information about how to play this section, or to complain about it was a marvelous microcosm. I knew I had to write about it. The citizens of Night City treat Cyberpsychosis as just one of the vices of their existence living in this urban landscape, and players who tackle this mission treat the bugs and challenges in a similar fashion. Both look at these 17 individuals as a glitch, an annoyance, a disruption, or just one more thing in a city of seemingly endless possibility.
As far as I can tell, almost no-one has bothered to observe any ounce of empathy that these people are suffering.
Somehow Cyberpunk 2077 has managed to create a Side-Quest that exemplifies the apathy of the world that lives in the core of the Cyberpunk genre in and outside of a videogame. As V collects one more shard, and as the ghost of Johnny Silverhand offers one more quip about the hopelessness of life, Night City blazes on bright and full of smiles that are as hollow as the souls behind them.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
1.20.2025
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