With Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 due to premiere on Netflix on October 20, Night City is once again pulling at the edges of my attention. If you missed the first season, its brisk and brutal 10 episodes remain essential viewing before the new story arrives.
Whether the sequel can match the original’s emotional highs and devastating lows will become clear at launch. For me, though, the new series already looks like a strong reason to return to Cyberpunk 2077 and revisit its dystopian metropolis.
Edgerunners makes Night City feel familiar
Studio Trigger leads the anime production in collaboration with CD Projekt Red, the developer of Cyberpunk 2077. That partnership has helped the series recreate Night City with remarkable accuracy. Trailers for the second season have already encouraged players to identify the exact locations shown in individual scenes.
The new story is not centred on V or the friends encountered throughout 2077, but its version of the city still carries a powerful sense of familiarity. Watching Trigger’s animation can feel like looking across a place that should be hostile and alien, yet has somehow become a kind of home.
A return to Cyberpunk 2077 feels inevitable
The first Edgerunners season is widely credited with helping restore confidence in Cyberpunk 2077 after the game’s notoriously troubled 2020 launch. A current-generation release and a series of updates addressed many of its problems, while CD Projekt Red has since begun work on a sequel.
Edgerunners 2 does not have to rescue the game from that difficult starting point. Instead, its trailers are prompting a more personal response: the sentimental pull of a world that absorbed hundreds of hours of play. For more coverage of the wider gaming and arcade scene, explore RETROCADE’s Arcade Blog.
I have not played Cyberpunk 2077 recently, although I spent substantial time with it at launch, returned to it for a book-club-style podcast called Normandy FM, and later played through the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion. Every so often, I scroll through thousands of screenshots like an old photo album, revisiting locations and characters while the game’s breakout song plays in my headphones.
The series became an effortless way to reconnect with the hope, despair and danger of Night City without actually picking up the game again. That period of withdrawal may be about to end. A new set of trailers, a new cast and another descent into cyberpsychosis could be enough to make me reinstall 2077.
Night City’s beautiful, rotten core
Night City is not a place anyone should reasonably want to revisit. Yet its chrome-plated style and relentless energy conceal a city shaped by the end stages of capitalism, where survival depends on forming bonds with others who are struggling to endure the same conditions.
Edgerunners 2 appears set to deliver another 10-episode examination of that contradiction: a metropolis that is visually alluring while remaining fundamentally broken. Its new characters may be heading towards tragedy, and the audience may become attached to them just in time for their stories to hurt.
That potential heartbreak is only part of the appeal. Each animated street could also trigger a memory of travelling through Night City in 2077—perhaps enough motivation to start the game, climb onto a motorcycle and search for the same places visited by the new edgerunners.
For readers inspired to create a dedicated gaming setup, RETROCADE’s arcade machines and compact bartop arcades offer two ways to bring a gaming corner to life. You can also compare options with the Arcade Machine Buying Guide.
“I Really Want To Stay In Your House” remains an especially effective reminder of why returning to this world can feel so tempting.
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