RAGING AGAINST THE POINTLESS, OVERPRICED MACHINES IN CYBERPUNK 2077

The residents of Night City love tech so much that they've grafted it to their faces. Vincent is the exception.

- By James Nouch

PART 1 They say that Night City will tear apart the unwary. And as for everybody else - well, they're busy tearing themselves apart anyway, hacking their bodies with cybernetic implants courtesy of the city's ripperdocs. You see, in order to make it big in this teeming megalopolis, you have to be willing to upgrade your own fleshy hardware with the kind of urgency that people usually reserve for a PC running Windows 10. Trouble is, Vincent isn't prepared to do any of that.

I think it's because he's an old soul - the kind of person who tells you that Night City was better "in the old days". Or, to put it another way: better before all this cyberware ruined everything. Vincent may have a USB-C port in his temple and a cat 5 running out of his wrist, but that's it. By the standards of Night City he is an absolute luddite.

Perhaps it's this simmering frustration with the pace of technological change that's driven Vincent to the place that I find him: attempting to escape the high-security base of the murderous underworld gang known as Maelstrom. These cyberware-obsessed thugs have jammed so much high-end tech into their sore and puckered flesh that some of them barely look human any more. Their most dedicated members resemble an overloaded four-way extension lead: lumpy, dangerous and bathed in the glare of a sinister red light.

Believe it or not, Vincent actually came in peace - dispatched on a mission to acquire a cutting-edge military surveillance bot. Unfortunately, negotiations got off to a tense start when the gang's leader pointed a gun in Vincent's face. As if that wasn't enough of a faux pas, he demanded Vincent hand over double the agreed price just for the privilege of walking out alive with the nightmarish, spider-legged bot in tow. Now, this is exactly the kind of horseplay that really gets Vincent's goat.