We are about a month away from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’s Netflix premiere, and if you haven’t watched the excellent first season, it’s a brisk, brutal 10 episodes on the streaming service. Is Edgerunners’ second season going to hit the same highs and devastating lows as the first? We’ll know when it premieres on October 20, but whatever the case, I think it’s going to merit a trip back to Night City, and thus, a reinstall of Cyberpunk 2077.
Studio Trigger is the primary team behind the Edgerunners anime, but the show is made in collaboration with Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, and thus, has pretty accurate recreations of the game’s open world of Night City. Even in the trailers we’ve seen of the second season, players have been able to track down the precise places on the map Trigger referenced in each shot. Edgerunners may not be about 2077 protagonist V or the friends I made there, but just watching the show makes me feel nostalgic for a dystopian nightmare city that feels like home at this point.
The first season of Edgerunners is often cited as helping usher in the “redemption arc” that Cyberpunk 2077 needed after its notoriously poor launch in 2020. The game’s current-gen port and multiple updates to iron out all the kinks pushed it over the finish line, and now CD Projekt Red is working on a sequel. Edgerunners 2 doesn’t need to help hoist the game out of the gutter, so instead, watching its trailers mostly just elicits the sentimentality 2077 managed to draw out of me after hundreds of hours spent living in Night City.
I haven’t been back to Cyberpunk 2077 in a while. I played it extensively at launch, played it again for book club-style podcast I do called Normandy FM, and then dove into it once more for the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, and every now and then I get wistful and scroll through my thousands of screenshots like I’m looking at an old photo album, remembering a place I haven’t seen and people I haven’t talked to in a while with the soundtrack’s breakout song “I Really Want To Stay In Your House” playing in my headphones. Edgerunners, for a time, was an easy hit of cyberpsychosis, letting me taste all the feelings of hope and despair that come with persisting in Night City without having to get my virtual cybernetic hands dirty, and for a while, I’ve been clean.
Night City isn’t somewhere I should want to go back to, but I do, and Edgerunners 2 sounds like it will be another 10-episode exploration of just how much Cyberpunk’s metropolis cranks up the end stages of capitalism, even if it presents the rot and despair with incredible and alluring style. The city’s chrome-covered shell conceals a rotten core, only kept livable for its residents by walking hand-in-hand with others who are also struggling to survive within its borders. Edgerunners 2’s story will likely end in tragedy for its new cast of characters, who I’ll likely grow attached to just in time to be devastated by their fates, but it’s also a new opportunity to look at every scene Trigger animated and remember when I passed through those streets myself, maybe giving me a reason to boot 2077 back up, hop on my motorcycle, and find a spot its cast of edgerunners also passed through, once upon a time.
