I was first exposed to Cyberpunk by Deus Ex, RoboCop, System Shock and Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Especially the latter two horror examples gave me an acute appreciation for the themes of Cyberpunk; that of vulnerable human beings making their way through a horrorscape of corporate technology gone awry. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 seems fun and all, but there’s nothing like a good infusion of horror to make the ugly side of a genre press down on your throat like a boot of oppressive atmosphere and make you distinctly aware of its urging.
After playing Alien Isolation, I think I was looking for another tickle: Crawling through a derelict space station, abandoned by the corporations because of socioeconomic depression, stalked by androids, trying to slap together various bits of futuristic technology to make them work for you, and hunted by a chitinous, machine-like creature looking to drive itself into your body to subvert its normal function.
Same I guess with SHODAN from System Shock 2 being an AI dominatrix, making unwanted cybernetic alterations to your organic body and treating you like a gerbil with a circuit board implanted.
One of Cyberpunk 2077’s corporations offering you the Midnight Lady and Mr. Studd augments might make us snicker “why not?” - because the meaning of foreign tech intruding upon our human lives might have been lost on us past the 90s, in the Zeitgeist of iPhones and the potential humour of mechanical dick jokes.
It’s in the threat of Horror Cyberpunk raping you into becoming another entity’s incubator or plaything, that still makes me capable of going “Why, god why?” and invoking the feeling that we’ve really gone wrong somewhere.
As for Cyberpunk 2077? CDPR got me here. I like Cyberpunk, but not enough to follow every release. CDPR did that.