Cyberpunk 2077 Complete Guide & Walkthrough

I've played through Cyberpunk 2077 four times now from the lifepath intro all the way through the credits to the post-credit messages and the empty apartment that waits for you no matter which ending you picked and honestly at this point I've spent more hours in Night City than I have in some actual cities I've lived in which is probably not healthy but here we are and I'm still finding new things every run because the game is that dense. Full runs. Every side gig and every scanner hustle and every possible ending including the one that made me stare at my screen for ten minutes afterward without touching my keyboard or my drink or anything else in the room that could distract me from what I just witnessed. So this is everything I know about getting through Night City without losing your mind or your eddies or your enthusiasm for a game that really rewards people who take their time with it instead of sprinting toward the finale like the main quest desperately shoves you toward and basically tricks you into missing half the content that makes this game worth playing in the first place.

The game is enormous in a way that's kinda hard to explain to someone who hasn't played it because you finish the prologue and the map opens up and suddenly there are two hundred icons everywhere and the main quest is screaming at you about dying in two weeks and you have no idea what to do first and the panic is real and most people either freeze or rush and both are mistakes that cost you content you can never get back on that save file unless you replay the entire thing from scratch which most people won't do because who has that kind of time honestly. Overwhelming by design honestly. But honestly that urgency they push at you is completely fake and I mean that literally because nobody tells you this and I wish someone had told me on my first run when I plowed through the main story in thirty hours and missed seventy percent of the side content that actually makes the world feel alive and lived-in and worth caring about.

Not pretty, this guide. Neither is Night City tbh and that's kind of the whole aesthetic point I think.

Act 1 is the part everyone rushes through because they want to get to Keanu Reeves and you do a lifepath intro that takes twenty minutes and then you meet Jackie and run a few tutorial missions and before you know it you're in the back of a Delamain cab heading to Konpeki Plaza with a biochip in your neural slot and you've missed half of what Watson has to offer because the narrative momentum pushes you forward so aggressively that stopping to do side content feels wrong even though stopping is exactly what you should be doing right then and there before the story takes the wheel and drives you off a cliff. Sprinting through Act 1 is honestly a mistake and I made it on my first run and I've literally watched three friends make the exact same one because the game's pacing tricks you into thinking Act 1 is just a glorified tutorial when it's actually a self-contained district with enough content to fill ten hours and some of the best gig writing in the entire game that you'll never see if you beeline the main quest toward the Heist.

Watson lockdown. Your training wheels and your safety net and the only part of the game where every enemy is tuned to be beatable at low level with bad gear and no perks. Watson stays locked off from the rest of the map until you finish The Heist so every single thing you can see on the map right now is available to you at low level and nothing else opens up until you pull the trigger on the main quest and commit to the Konpeki Plaza job. So use every inch of it while you can because once you leave Watson you can always come back but the vibe is different and some of the early-game dialogue from fixers hits harder when you're still a nobody merc who hasn't been shot in the head yet and doesn't have Johnny Silverhand commenting on everything you do. Every NCPD scanner hustle in Watson is doable at low level and you can hit level 12 or even 13 before stepping into Konpeki Plaza if you clear the district thoroughly and I've done it twice now and it took about five hours each time but I walked into that hotel with double jump legs and a tech shotgun that turned the lobby combat into target practice instead of the desperate cover-shooter panic that happens when you go in at level four with a starter pistol and no cyberware worth mentioning and absolutely no idea how the combat actually works beyond pointing and shooting and hoping.

Do all 17 of them. Seriously just clear the district.

The cash builds fast and the cyberware you can afford by level 12 makes Act 1 feel like a completely different game where you're the threat instead of the victim and the combat actually becomes genuinely fun instead of stressful and nerve-wracking.

And the Maelstrom mission with the Flathead bot is where everything can go wrong in about six different ways depending on what you said to Meredith Stout during that slightly threatening corpo meeting in the motel room and whether you decided to hack the cred chip or pay with your own cash or just shoot everyone in the room the moment things got tense which is also a valid and honestly satisfying choice if you've already decided you don't like any of these people and just want the mission to be over. This is where the game first demonstrates that choices actually have consequences that echo through the next forty hours of gameplay and by the time you realize what you set in motion it's too late to reload without losing significant progress and you just have to live with the outcome you created which is kind of the whole point of the roleplaying genre. Done every variation now across four playthroughs. Honestly the best outcome for a first run is paying with your own money and staying friendly with Maelstrom because you lose ten grand but you don't make a permanent enemy of a gang that controls half of Watson and that matters way more later when you're trying to navigate gang territory without getting shot on sight than the eddies do in the moment when ten grand feels like a lot of money.

Don't skip Dum Dum's inhaler by the way. Gross but the dialogue afterward is genuinely worth sitting through the coughing fit tbh.

The Heist itself and everything that happens in the penthouse where Yorinobu kills his father in a sudden fit of rage that sets the entire plot in motion and you're suddenly on a timer with guards everywhere and no way to go back to free roam until the sequence finishes one way or another and it's honestly one of the most intense sequences in the entire game. Stealth through the lobby is completely optional and the guard patterns are forgiving enough that even a non-stealth build can manage it with patience and some basic situational awareness but once you hit the penthouse floor there's no more sneaking because the scripted events take over and the game shifts from infiltration to survival in about three seconds and the tone whiplash is genuinely jarring in the best way. Grab the Satori katana from the AV on the landing pad during the escape sequence and I don't care if you're running a netrunner build or a shotgun build or a gorilla arms brawler because this weapon is the best melee option in the base game with a 500 percent crit damage multiplier that makes every fight afterward feel completely different and it's permanently missable if you leave that landing pad without checking it first and the game never tells you it exists and you'll only find out you missed it from a Reddit thread six months later. I've missed it before. Still annoyed about it.

After the heist everything falls apart completely and Jackie dies in the back of that Delamain cab while you're bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the head and the game steals six months of your life and puts a dead rockerboy construct in your skull that starts rewriting your neural pathways one sarcastic comment and unsolicited opinion at a time and Act 1 ends with you crawling out of a landfill while Johnny Silverhand's engram boots up in your brain like the worst roommate imaginable and the whole sequence is genuinely emotionally devastating if you let yourself feel it instead of just processing it as plot. But it's also where the game actually begins and everything before this point was setup and context and now the real story starts with a dead man living in your head and a death sentence hanging over everything you do from this moment forward.

Act 2. You wake up in Viktor's clinic after what feels like forever and Johnny Silverhand lives in your head now and the full map opens up and you suddenly have maybe ninety hours of content ahead of you spread across every district and every fixer and every side character who wants something from you and the screen is covered in so many icons that looking at the map triggers genuine anxiety and the game offers absolutely zero guidance on what order to do anything in and it's honestly one of the best and simultaneously worst design choices in the entire thing because freedom is great right up until it's paralyzing and you close the game because you can't decide what to do first. This is where most players get overwhelmed tbh and either quit entirely or beeline the main story just to feel like they have some direction and structure and both outcomes rob you of the best content the game has to offer which is almost all in the side missions.

Here's what I do on every run now after four playthroughs of trial and error and several abandoned saves that I'll probably never touch again but I keep them around anyway because deleting a save file feels wrong even when you know you're never going back to that version of V. First stop is your apartment stash to grab your guns because they're sitting there from Act 1 and you'll need them immediately since the random street encounters in Act 2 are tuned noticeably higher than anything you faced during the lockdown and getting caught without your weapons equipped is a quick way to die on a street corner somewhere. Then I go see Takemura at the diner to get the main quest formally started but I don't continue with him yet because the main quest urgency in Act 2 is a complete and total lie that the game tells you with a straight face, V is dying narratively but there is zero invisible timer counting down and you can ignore Takemura for eighty hours of side content while he sits at that diner eating yakitori indefinitely and nothing bad ever happens to the story or the world or your save file and he'll still be there waiting for you with the exact same dialogue as if you'd come straight from Viktor's clinic.

I learned this the hard way. Rushed through the main story on my first playthrough because the dialogue kept telling me I was actively dying and my brain naively trusted the game to be honest about its own stakes because why would a game lie to you about something that fundamental. Missed half the content. Don't be me. I've found this is basically the most common mistake new players make and almost everyone regrets it afterward.

After meeting Takemura I clear the quest log district by district in a specific order that I've settled on after four runs and a lot of experimentation with different approaches and sequence variations. Heywood first because the fixer gigs there are mostly combat-oriented and the enemy density is high enough to level your weapons and perks efficiently before tackling the harder districts without being so high that you die constantly and have to reload every two minutes. Then Watson cleanup of whatever side content I missed during the lockdown. Then Pacifica and the Badlands where the difficulty curve bends upward and the enemies get more aggressive and better equipped and the combat stops being forgiving in a way that catches you off guard if you're not paying attention to enemy levels. Santo Domingo last because the Maelstrom and Sixth Street fights in Santo Domingo get genuinely ugly and punishing if you're underleveled and I've found that level 20 is the comfortable minimum before you set foot there and even at level 20 some of those encounters will test your build and your combat instincts in ways the earlier districts never came close to doing.

The cyberpsycho sightings scattered across the map are the one thing I tell every new player to do early even though most people skip them entirely because they look like optional busywork that doesn't connect to the main story in any obvious way and the game never tells you why they matter. Not because the rewards are amazing tbh, the rewards are fine but nothing you'd write home about or specifically farm for. But because these encounters teach you combat fundamentals that the tutorial never covers and by the time you finish all seventeen sightings against enemies with completely different attack patterns and weakness profiles and environmental setups you'll actually know how to fight properly instead of just panic-aiming and hoping for the best and every combat encounter after that point will feel completely different because your hands know what to do even if your brain hasn't consciously processed the lesson yet. Every single person I've talked to who complained about the combat being too hard or too clunky had skipped the cyberpsycho missions entirely and I've talked to at least five people about this specific thing so it's not a coincidence or a fluke. They're training disguised as side content and they genuinely work as a combat tutorial that the game forgot to include anywhere else.

The Delamain questline is one I've got genuinely mixed and conflicted feelings about after all these runs because the individual missions are repetitive in a way that gets old and frustrating fast, find the car and deal with the glitch and repeat seven times in different parts of the city with slightly different combat scenarios each time but the exact same basic gameplay loop that wears thin by the fourth car. But the payoff at the end of the questline is one of the more interesting and genuinely thought-provoking ethical choices in the entire game and I still don't know what the right answer is after four full playthroughs and I've picked different options each time and probably will never arrive at a definitive conclusion. Do you merge the fractured AI personalities into one unified consciousness or reset them back to factory settings and erase everything they became during their time away from the mothership and all the experiences they accumulated independently? The merged version is more human and more interesting as a character and more sympathetic. But also more unstable and maybe more dangerous in the long term in ways you can't predict or control. Not sure about this but I think the reset option might actually be the kinder and more ethical choice even though it feels wrong and cruel in the moment and the game makes you feel terrible about picking it which is almost certainly exactly what the writers intended.

Decisions that actually change things. A lot of choices in this game are fake with different dialogue options leading to the exact same outcome and the illusion of agency is one of the more honest and meta design choices CDPR made even if it's deeply frustrating when you realize that your careful dialogue selection didn't matter at all. But some decisions are genuinely real and consequential and the game doesn't always tell you which ones matter until ten hours later when a character who could have helped you survive is dead because of something you said three acts ago and by then you're definitely not reloading because that's way too much progress to lose and you just have to live with the consequences of your own choices which is kind of the whole point of roleplaying games even if it stings.

During Automatic Love when you visit Clouds and talk to the dolls you have to pick between Angel and Skye and it seems like such a trivial and insignificant choice at the moment you make it but the flavor and emotional register of the conversation shifts dramatically depending on who you choose even though the information you receive is functionally identical. Pick Angel if you want a more vulnerable and emotionally raw conversation that forces you to confront some genuinely uncomfortable truths about your V and the life they've been living and the choices they've made along the way that led them to this specific moment in a dollhouse in Night City. Pick Skye if you want something more clinical and detached and professional that keeps you at arm's length from the emotional weight of what's happening and lets you maintain the protective shell that V has built around themselves. Done both versions across different playthroughs. The Angel conversation hit me harder and felt more personal and intimate in ways I genuinely was not expecting from what I assumed was just another background side conversation in a long game full of them.

The Voodoo Boys mission in Pacifica after you get what you need from the net is where I always make the exact same choice now without even a moment of hesitation or second-guessing. The VDB use you from the moment you meet them and every single word out of Placide's mouth is contempt hidden behind a paper-thin layer of cooperation that doesn't hold up under even the most casual scrutiny and they never once treat you as anything other than a disposable tool who exists only to serve their interests and further their agenda and the moment your usefulness expires they will discard you without a second thought and the game makes this abundantly clear long before the choice point arrives. So I betray them now on every single playthrough with zero hesitation and zero guilt because the loot from their hideout is decent and you never need them again after this mission and their netrunner vendor disappears but by that point in the game you should already have better cyberdecks from other sources anyway and the pure satisfaction of turning on people who never respected you for a single second is worth more than any vendor discount or unique item they might have offered if you stayed loyal.

Takemura during Search and Destroy when the Arasaka compound collapses around you and everything is on fire and your first and most powerful instinct is to run because that's what the game has trained you to do in every emergency situation up until this exact moment. If you don't go back for him after the building collapses he's dead and gone from the rest of the game permanently with no resurrection and no way to bring him back and you'll never see his character arc resolve or his story complete and he becomes just another casualty of a mission gone wrong. But if you save him. He shows up later in the story and his dialogue in the endgame sequences is some of the best acting and writing and character work in the entire game and his presence fundamentally changes how one of the major endings plays out in a way that makes that ending hit completely differently than it would without him standing there next to you. Took me two full playthroughs to even realize I could save him.

The game doesn't signal the option at all and I'm honestly still kind of annoyed about how hidden this was because it's such an important character moment. The building is actively collapsing and every survival instinct tells you to get out immediately without looking back. Go back for him anyway. The extra thirty seconds of panic and disorientation are absolutely worth it in the end and you'll know why when you see his endgame scenes.

Phantom Liberty slots into Act 2 right after the Voodoo Boys questline when Songbird contacts you with an urgent message that sounds exactly like a trap and is a trap but also isn't a trap and also is one depending on how you look at it and who you choose to believe and how much of her story and her pain and her manipulation you're willing to accept at face value without questioning the parts that don't quite add up when you think about them later. Ignore her for a few levels anyway because Dogtown enemies are tuned significantly and noticeably higher than anything in the base game and going in at level 20 will get you killed repeatedly in ways that are not fun and will make you hate the DLC that is otherwise genuinely the best thing CDPR has ever made across all their games. Level 25 is the bare minimum honestly and honestly even that feels tight and uncomfortable for some of the early Dogtown encounters when you don't know the enemy layouts yet. Thirty is basically comfortable and you can actually engage with the combat systems instead of just surviving. Thirty-five is where you can genuinely enjoy the combat and experiment with different approaches instead of just huddling behind cover and praying the next autosave is close.

This DLC is the best thing CD Projekt RED has ever made and I'm not being dramatic or exaggerating for theatrical effect, the spy thriller pacing and the setpiece missions and Idris Elba's impossibly good performance as Solomon Reed elevate the entire experience to a level that makes the already excellent base game feel like a warmup by comparison and I know that sounds like hyperbole but I've finished the DLC three times now across three different builds and three different V backgrounds and it lands with the same emotional impact every single time without diminishing returns. The map size looks small and contained on the overview screen but Dogtown is dense vertically in a way that no district in the base game even approaches with more content packed into every square meter than anywhere else in the game world and pathways that loop back on themselves and connect in unexpected ways and secrets hidden on rooftops and in basement levels and behind unmarked doors that you'd never find without thorough exploration and you'll spend twenty hours there without realizing how much time has actually passed because the density keeps you engaged the entire time.

Relic perks from the DLC are far and away the biggest mechanical addition to the entire game with three slots that are each genuinely build-defining in ways that change how combat feels at a fundamental level and they're permanent once chosen with absolutely no way to respec or change them later no matter how much you regret your decision or how badly you want to try a different combination. Spatial Mapping for melee builds reveals weak points on every enemy during combat and turns every fight into a precision targeting exercise instead of a button-mashing slugfest where you just swing until things die. Limiter Removal gives netrunners a temporary overclock state that lets you one-shot even skull-marked enemies who normally take multiple minutes to wear down through conventional quickhacks and the power spike is so dramatic and so sudden that going back to a non-DLC save file feels like playing a completely different and significantly weaker game. Vulnerability Analytics makes your damage output feel almost unfair in the best possible way and enemies that used to be threatening become target practice. Pick based on your build honestly because you are locked in permanently the moment you choose and there is no going back without loading an old save that might be hours behind your current progress and nobody wants to replay hours of content just to change one perk choice.

The story branches hard about halfway through Phantom Liberty and one path keeps you playing the spy game with Reed in a way that feels like a classic espionage thriller with double crosses and hidden agendas and moral compromises that accumulate over time. The other path lets you break free with Songbird in a way that feels more desperate and more human and more tragic and more hopeful all at once and both paths are good and both are painful in completely different ways that resonate with different parts of your own personality and worldview and both have consequences that echo into the base game endings and fundamentally change how you'll see everything that comes after including characters and story beats from the main campaign that you thought you'd already fully processed and resolved. The Phantom Liberty conclusion is the best writing in all of Cyberpunk 2077 including every single base game ending without exception and I sat through the credits without touching my keyboard or my phone or anything else in the room and just let the emotional weight of the entire experience settle into my bones.

Nocturne Op55N1 is the point of no return and when this mission appears in your journal you are at the end of the road and the game tells you explicitly and repeatedly that this is it and there's no turning back but after eighty hours of the game lying to you about urgency and stakes it's genuinely easy and understandable to assume this is just another fake deadline designed to create narrative pressure without actual lasting consequences. It's not fake this time and I need you to believe me on this because I've been burned by this exact assumption. Once you go to Embers you are fully committed to the ending sequence and there's no more free roam and no more side content and no more anything except the ending you've chosen and the approximately two hours of narrative that follow your final decisions and that's it.

Before you go to Embers make a manual save and name it something obvious and unmistakable like BEFORE THE END so you can find it easily later when you inevitably want to see different endings without replaying the entire hundred-hour game. Then make three more manual saves in completely different slots because the ending sequence runs about two hours of unskippable content and some ending paths share checkpoints and one bad autosave during the sequence means replaying an hour or more of content just to see a different outcome and that hour feels very long and tedious when you've already seen most of those scenes once before. I use four save slots now because I learned this lesson the hard and painful way. Twice in fact. Once on my first run when I only had a single manual save and got permanently locked into an ending I didn't want and couldn't go back and had to live with my choices like a grown adult and then again on my third run because I thought I was being clever and efficient with my save management strategy and I absolutely and categorically was not.

At Embers you meet Hanako in the restaurant and she offers the Arasaka deal with all the poise and coldness you'd expect from someone who has been a corporate princess for her entire life and this is where your ending path formally starts in terms of the game's internal branching flags and which characters are available for you to call and which endings are accessible and which doors have already closed forever. But the real decision that actually determines which ending you experience happens on the rooftop afterward when you and Johnny have your final conversation about everything that's happened between you and you have to choose who to call from that rooftop while looking out over the city that's been your home and your prison for the last hundred hours. That single call determines everything that follows and there's no going back after you dial and the game doesn't let you call a second person even though you might desperately want to in the moment when you realize what you've committed to.

Panam for the Aldecaldos ending where you leave Night City behind with a found family of nomads who chose you back as fiercely as you chose them and a fragile ghost of hope that the cyberpunk genre usually doesn't permit because the literary tradition is fundamentally pessimistic about systems and institutions and the possibility of genuine escape and this ending is the closest thing to an exception that the writers were willing to grant their audience. Rogue for the Afterlife legend ending where V becomes the most famous and successful merc in Night City history but pays for their legend status in the worst possible currency which is time and the ending leaves you sitting in a luxury penthouse with everything you ever thought you wanted and absolutely nothing you actually need and the emptiness is the point. Johnny for the secret ending if you triggered the right dialogue flags during the oil field scene after Chippin' In and it's the hardest combat sequence in the entire game by a wide and unforgiving margin with no allies and no backup and no second chances and if you die during the run it's permanent game over with no reload and no checkpoint and the credits roll on your failure. Hanako for the corpo ending where you sign your soul to Arasaka corporation and get exactly what cyberpunk stories have always promised their protagonists which is a hollow and pyrrhic victory that tastes like ashes in your mouth and leaves you wondering whether you won or lost and the answer is that you somehow did both at the exact same time and neither outcome feels good.

Pick based on what you want V to become in those final hours when all the side content is behind you and all that's left is the person you've been building and shaping and breaking and rebuilding for the last hundred hours of your life. Not what's optimal because optimal doesn't exist in a genre where every single victory is pyrrhic by definition and the absolute best you can kinda realistically hope for is a dignified and meaningful defeat that meant something to someone. Every ending is tragic honestly in its own particular and carefully crafted way because that's the genre contract you signed when you booted up the game and happy endings were never on the table and if you went into Cyberpunk 2077 genuinely expecting a happy and satisfying resolution you were playing the completely wrong game from the very first minute.

But if you're asking me what I'd pick if I could only ever see one ending and then never touch the game again for the rest of my life. The Star. Panam and the Aldecaldos and the endless desert stretching out ahead of you toward a horizon that might or might not hold a cure and the family you built along the way with people who chose you back as fiercely and completely as you chose them and the quiet knowledge that somewhere out beyond the city limits there might be more time and there might be a future and even if there isn't at least you're not dying alone in a penthouse with nothing but money and reputation for company and the credits are rolling and you're crying but they're not bad tears. It's the closest thing to genuine hope that this genre allows and the emotional payoff is real and earned and I cried during the credits on my first playthrough and I'm not even slightly embarrassed about admitting it because the game earned those tears fair and square through a hundred hours of storytelling that built to that exact moment.

The secret ending. Don't Fear The Reaper. Worth doing exactly once if you can trigger it by waiting silently on the rooftop for five full minutes without choosing any option while Johnny makes his offer and the camera just sits there in silence and you start to genuinely wonder if the scene is bugged and your game has frozen and then he speaks again and everything changes in an instant. Hardest combat in the entire game by a margin that feels almost unfair and if you die during the run it's over with no reload and no checkpoint and no second chance and the tension is genuine and visceral in a way that most game difficulty systems completely fail to achieve because the stakes are actual and real and the loss is permanent and irreversible. But V gets the longest possible survival window in this path compared to every other ending and if you want to feel like a genuine and authentic Night City legend who earned their reputation through pure skill and determination rather than save scumming and checkpoint abuse this is the only way to kinda truly earn that feeling and nothing else in the entire game comes even close to the deep satisfaction of clearing that final gauntlet on your first and only attempt.

Anywya that's the walkthrough after four full playthroughs and hundreds of hours spent wandering the streets of Night City and I still find something new every single time I boot up the game and just start walking because the city is dense and layered and detailed in a way that genuinely rewards obsessive and thorough play and punishes speed and impatience and the real game isn't in the main quest at all but in the alleys and rooftops and back rooms and unmarked locations and environmental storytelling details and overheard conversations that the main quest markers never point to and probably never will...