VHS-Inspired 'Cyberpunk 2077' Mod Takes Night City Back to the Future

Apart from being a genuinely good game—something no one would have predicted after its disastrous launch—Cyberpunk 2077 has become something of a laboratory for pushing the bounds of graphical hardware. YouTube is full of videos where people have plugged their RTX 5090s straight into a nearby power plant and created insanely detailed 8K videos wherein Night City really does almost look like a real-life city from the future. Almost. But not quite. And the thing is, unless VR breaks out of its 15-year “it’s going to a be a thing this time!” cycle and actually becomes a thing, it seems there’ll always be a fundamental disconnection between game graphics—no matter how true they are to life—and, y’know, life. There are many reasons for this, but one is that there’s actually something vaguely disconcerting about looking at 99% realistic graphics. Part of this is the well-documented Uncanny Valley phenomenon, but there’s another, simpler reason, too: nothing else on our screens looks like this. Most TV programs and films arrive in much lower fidelity than the hyper-detailed Night City videos available online. Movies, for example, have a certain look, and as much as anything, it’s because