While we all slowly drown in the discourse surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day and surely for at least the next few days before we all bumble on over to the next Big Hot Thing, I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight a very nice surprise that came with my physical copy of the game for PlayStation 4.
In the year 2020 when the only extra bits you get with your physical copies of games tends to be DLC code slips or ads for other games, CD Projekt took it upon themselves to include a fairly beefy manual, along with a whole heap of other free goodies.
Called the “Cyberpunk 2077 World Compendium” (the game’s manual by any other name), this booklet comes packed with all of the background detail you could need on the world of Cyberpunk, including the timeline leading up to the year 2077 itself. We’ve thankfully managed to avoid the worldwide wars between 1990 and 2020 in the game’s world, if only just.
From there, it was time to look at the environments of the game, the gigantic Night City being the main attraction. There’s no colour in the manual, which is a slight shame, but considering how mass produced physical copies of the game must have been, I can miss a little bit of purple and yellow.
It’s not just “Night City, look how stonking big it is”, either. The manual goes into a lot of detail about each district and their respective histories, as well as which gangs run them. I’ve almost completely blanked everything about Cyberpunk 2077 leading up to release (they sold me on it way back in 2013, in truth ((I like Archive)), so it was quite nice to read up on the game’s world while the disc whirred away with its installation on my PS5.
The manual kept surprising me beyond that with intel on the different lifepaths you can choose, gangs you can encounter, and corporations that inevitably lurch over everything in a dystopian world. By far my favourite part has to be the gameplay section which really does just scratch the surface of how deep the game goes, but basically just chucked me in a time machine and transported me back to 2003.
I was the kid who used to read video game manuals on the bus and in the middle of class, sometimes even during my lunch break. Those things were like my books; I remember slipping them between textbooks, reading them back to front multiple times, and carrying them around in my bag until they crinkled. I didn’t have a girlfriend, just in case you’re unsure.
I wasn’t alone, either — fellow chads would do the same and we’d often swap notes on character biographies and little gameplay things we didn’t know about. I vividly remember discussing the Final Fantasy X manual’s details on characters with someone back in middle school before we awkwardly broached the big weird kiss between Yuna and Tidus. I get the feeling that scene made a lot of young people very uncomfortable back in the day.
While it’s far from the biggest thing about the biggest game of the year, Cyberpunk 2077’s physical manual really meant a lot to me as someone who grew up on them and watched them sort of just disappear one day. Yes, it’s not viable to include a physical manual for most companies for many reasons, but it still feels like something is missing in physical games without them, all these years later. Thanks to CD Projekt, at least I get to think back on a spinning underwater snog one more time and get utterly confused all over again.
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