Let's talk about the new ending Phantom Liberty introduces to CDPR's gritty sci-fi RPG
, introduces a new ending to CD Projekt Red’s sci-fi RPG, and it’s one I have a hard time reconciling with the game as it already exists. Sure, it’s certainly definitive and ends the story in a pretty profound, subversive way, but it also reflects so directly on every other variation of’s story that it feels more like a coda to the game as a whole than a satisfying conclusion to the specific story it tells. Even so, Iadds.
But this work has eroded her, not unlike how Johnny Silverhand’s presence wears away at V. Where V has become a victim of a corporation’s delusions of life-sustaining grandeur, Songbird has been used by her country, pushed well beyond what any human body is capable of withstanding. She, alongside Idris Elba’s Solomon Reed, illustrates how patriotic devotion is just as dangerous as giving your life to a corporation.
After all the fighting, Songbird is tired. Delirious, even, and in that delirium, she confesses she’s been playing me the entire time. There’s only one dose of the cure, and she’s played everyone to get it for herself. But she passes out, and Johnny points out that, if you’re feeling vindictive, this would be a prime opportunity to call up Reed and offer a trade: Songbird for her cure. In my “canon” playthrough, I basically said “gg” to Songbird and put her on the rocket.
Then I woke up. The surgery to remove the Relic was a success, but as Reed stands over my bed to deliver the news, he seems different. Gone is the military-grade equipment I’m used to seeing him in; instead, he seems dressed for an office job. He says that’s because he’s doing more paperwork these days. But that seems like a big change for just the few days since the surgery, right? I’ll survive, he tells me, but the cost is far greater than anyone anticipated.
I feel a mix of emotions about it; as someone who viewed my V’s desire to be remembered in the face of his own mortality as paramount to what made his story so impactful, it doesn’t resonate with me in the same way the other endings do. But as a new angle from which to view the entirety of, it fucking hits. It carries pieces of each existing ending with it, combining and retooling them to examine what we know.