YouTuber Any Austin played Cyberpunk for 15 hours straight – not as a hardened mercenary, but as a service employee in an Asian restaurant.
Cyberpunk 2077 lets you explore an impressive open world in Night City. However, apart from the typical mercenary challenges, there isn’t all that much to do in the city. The world isn’t quite as interactive as in GTA, for example, and even Skyrim offers more everyday activities.
So why would anyone even think of leading a normal life here? For example, to produce an entertaining video and venture into a true self-experiment. That was probably the motivation behind YouTuber Any Austin, who does just that in his latest video.
A week in Night City
To see what happens and how the game behaves, Any Austin has done everything possible to live a normal life for a week in Night City. This means that for this playthrough, he is not playing as V, who goes on dangerous missions every day as a mercenary with a rock star in his head. Instead, he lives in a small apartment in an average mega-building and has a fairly normal job as a service worker.
He lets time pass normally in the game and wants to last a week without being late for work, getting too little sleep, eating, or going to the bathroom. However, since a day in Cyberpunk 2077 lasts a full 180 minutes – which is much, much longer than the standard in open-world games – that would be 21 hours of pure playtime.
But since the YouTuber also skips time when his character goes to sleep, it was more like 15 hours – which he played in one go, after all. He only ate when there was food in the game and then the real-life equivalent.
How the experiment went
For seven days, Any Austin had to live his life in the dystopian metropolis, going to work in the morning, where he slaved away for 12 in-game hours. After that, he allowed himself a little free time, got food from vending machines, and occasionally sat on benches or played games in the game. He took at least one day off per week.
Here are a few of the observations he made during that time:
- He was able to observe very well how Cyberpunk 2077 places its NPCs. For example, different NPCs always sat in the same seats in the restaurant. At the same time in the evening, all the guests disappeared automatically.
- Although the NPCs, i.e., guests and colleagues, were all generic and never had much to say, Any Austin was able to build relationships with them. He had regulars he liked and colleagues he even talked to—despite their repetitive or absent responses. Once, he sat next to a stranger on the street for a while and “talked” to him at length.
- The most challenging part was going to work every day and being bored there. There were no real game mechanics and the NPCs were one-dimensional – but he still spent about 90 real minutes in the restaurant every day. During that time, he was mainly bored, but according to him, that was somehow fitting and enriched the experience.
- He was fascinated to see how functional public transportation is in the game and that there was a real map of the train routes in Night City, which he could use to get around the city.
- He also became more aware of the problems in Night City. For example, the amount of work, the stressful advertising, and the fact that it’s simply safer to sit at home playing games or doing drugs than to get shot by a gang while trying to ride the roller coaster.
He also learned to appreciate many small moments that he would never have had otherwise. Like when he danced with a man in the disco who had a special energy, or when he looked out over the city and was overcome with real feelings of existential melancholy. The passage of time in the game also became much clearer to him.
All in all, the experience was of course very exhausting, often frustrating and simply boring – but the experiment was definitely worthwhile for the YouTuber. As a viewer, it is also fascinating to see how he interacts with the world, how he maintains relationships with minimal opportunities and what stories emerge, even though there are no real impulses for them.
