When I played Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time, I chose the “nomad” backstory which defines essentially a character who has been so burned by late stage capitalism that they ran away to live in a small commune in the desert.

While playing through the game, I thought the advertisements littering Night City were incredibly jarring like they were supposed to be from a Borderlands game, or at least one that was way more tongue-in-cheek. The world of Night City was far too depressing to reasonably include those utterly ridiculous ads and it made it hard for me to feel immersed. Then it hit me; that’s exactly how I was supposed to feel, and then it paradoxically made me feel like this game set in a future world with insanely high-tech appliances available to all its citizens was indistinguishable from my own. I literally forgot multiple times that this game was set in an alternate future and not just in some city in California