PROVING THAT THE HUMAN TOUCH IS WHAT COUNTS IN CYBERPUNK 2077

Night City may be a techno-nightmare, but one man and his defiantly low-tech bat are here to clean up the mess

- James Nouch

To the untrained ear, the sound of a baseball bat making contact with one variety of smug, cyberware-packed corporate merc sounds much like any other. To Vincent, the thunks and thwacks and ka-whams are all part of one glorious symphony that he’s conducting with an extra-long stainless steel baton. As the corpo goons topple and scatter, Vincent hears music.

When we last encountered Vincent, he was struggling. As a grumbling luddite trying to scrape a living in the relentlessly futuristic metropolis of Night City, he found himself constantly outpaced and outmanoeuvred by young upstarts with smart weapons, sub-dermal armour and inflammation-free joints. But then, he discovered a low-tech solution to all of his problems. He discovered the bat. And now, he’s thriving.

If you’re looking for proof of how thoroughly Vincent has turned things around, look no further than his success rate against Cyberpsychos. These unfortunate tech-devotees have embraced cybernetic modification to such a degree that they’ve lost sight of what it means to be human altogether. Their disregard for the human worth of anyone not utterly wreathed in chrome makes Cyberpsychos uniquely dangerous to the general population, but not – so far – to Vincent.

Now, he’s headed to the location of yet another Cyberpsycho sighting, a secluded hilltop home out in the badlands to the east of Night City. Our fixer informs us that locals recently reported hearing shots from the house, but upon vaulting the fence Vincent finds few signs of habitation. The tumbledown structure is surrounded by trash, wrecked cars and stunted vegetation. An eerie quiet prevails. Just as we’re about to mosey on up to the front door, a heavily armed drone floats into our field of view. And as we stop to inspect the scene once more, Vincent spots a pair of turrets mounted to the roof of the house. A few more steps, and we would likely have been shredded into a fine julienne.