Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t redeem itself. We just lowered the bar.

Let me say the quiet part first, because the comments are going to anyway: Phantom Liberty is excellent, the 2.0 overhaul fixed the moment-to-moment game, and Night City in 2026 is genuinely one of the best-looking places you can spend a hundred hours. All true. None of it is the same thing as redemption.

The comeback story is doing a lot of work

The narrative we’ve all agreed to tell is tidy: broken at launch, fixed by heroes, vindicated in the end. It’s a good story. It also conveniently launders two years of selling a game that didn’t run, on platforms it was pulled from, with a marketing campaign that promised a different game entirely. “They fixed it” is true. “Therefore it was fine” is a sleight of hand.

A patch can repair a frame rate. It can’t retroactively un-sell you the thing you were promised.

And here’s the part that actually bothers me — the fixed game is great, but it’s great at being a slick open-world RPG, not the systemic, reactive, your-choices-matter immersive sim the trailers implied. We didn’t get the promised game patched into existence. We got a very good different game, and decided to call it a redemption because that felt better than admitting the first thing is never coming.

What’s actually true

• The 2.0 skill trees and cyberware are the version that should have shipped.
• Phantom Liberty’s spy-thriller arc is the best writing in the game by a distance.
• The open world is still gorgeous and still a little hollow once you’ve seen the seams.

Play it. Love it, even. Just don’t let the comeback arc rewrite what the launch actually cost — a 7 today, and the 7 includes the memory.