Earlier this week, I wrote about Detroit: Become Human, and why Connor was not only its best character, but the only redeeming quality in a game that seemed determined to get in its own way at every turn. That, naturally, got me thinking about Cyberpunk 2077 - another game whose worst flaws are internal, another game with greatness inside of it that is unable to get out. No patches can fix Cyberpunk 2077 at this stage, it’s too lacking in overall design, too narrow in its view of the future, too interested in style to bother with substance. Still, I have put in over 125 hours, so there must be something keeping me coming back to it, right? One of those things is the supporting cast, especially Brendan.

I did not enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 at all in my first, 25 hour or so playthrough. The second time, I spent over 100 hours mainly enjoying the photo mode and using the game as a fashion shoot simulator, subverting the violence and carnage the game so clearly wants. When you do this though, you see the inherent contradictions within the game. It’s set in the future, but its attitudes are dated. It pushes its ‘transgender character creator’, yet offers a very binary world. It prickles with a punk edge, then asks you to help out the cops. I’ve written of these contradictions before. There’s also the fact that for a game so violent, its best missions don’t require a single bullet (especially Sinnerman), and the fact none of its great characters have anything that Cyberpunk about them. Wrapped up in all of these contradictions is Brendan.

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Much like Connor in Detroit, Brendan is played by Bryan Dechart, and he’s a machine that teeters on the edge of sentience. He’s a vending machine, and if you go and visit him throughout your time in Night City, you can have different conversations with him about life, the city, and his good friend Theo. While Connor (and many artificial intelligence programs) battle with the idea of sentience and what it means to be alive, Brendan is more carefree. He is not concerned about whether this unit has a soul, only whether this unit has enough soda.

Brendan vending machine Cyberpunk

As the story goes on, it’s V who runs things through their mind. Brendan seems simultaneously advanced and simplistic - eloquent and learned, yet restricted and (most importantly) trapped in a vending machine. Much like Cyberpunk’s best missions, this one is all about the narrative. There is very little action in Brendan’s whole arc. It’s the kind of mission you only find by playing the game as I played it the second time, wandering the streets looking for interesting locations, and stumbling across an alleyway with a talking vending machine in it. There are certainly better missions from a gameplay point of view; Cyberpunk 2077 could not have survived if every interaction was like Brendan’s. It’s because it’s so different from the runaway cars, gang warfare, and terrorist haunting your brain cells that Brendan works.

I'm getting into Brendan spoiler territory here, so go away and look for Brendan if you haven't met him. If you have though, you'll know that in the final mission, Brendan is taken back to the factory because his personality needs to be reset. That he's able to remember people so well "creeps them out," plus in a rare piece of sharp satire from a game so desperate to be seen as intelligent, Brendan occasionally dispenses free soda, which hurts the bottom line. As he's reset, you learn that his programming is not complex enough to be a true AI, that he is in fact a powerful but far less advanced VI. However, his last words are still a request that you tell Theo that he'll miss her, and that she's stronger than she thinks she is.

V in a yellow jacket Cyberpunk 2077

This adds an extra layer to all of your conversations with Brendan, and in a genre full of androids dreaming of electric sheep, tries to offer something new. I wouldn't want any expansion on Brendan, because him being such a fleeting part of your journey is a major part of the appeal. But I do want every single player to meet him because, over a year on from launch, I still don't hear many people mention him, and that's a huge shame.

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