Last week, I wrote about my frustrations in how heavily Cyberpunk 2077 leans on you to help the police. While the map is constantly dotted with various ways to assist John Law, two redeeming features of the game's surprising focus on the long, metallic arm of the law remain. First, the Cyberpsychos, who act as minibosses dotted around the map for V to take on in a variety of head to head battles. The second, however, is far more interesting, far more controversial, and centres around a turtle.
There were so many controversies with Cyberpunk 2077 that it's difficult to keep track. The turtle, however, has always been one of the most memorable. Most of the controversies can be split into two basic camps. First off, the graphics/bugs/crashes, and secondly the issues with the game's tone. From its reliance on Yellow Peril tropes with zero interrogation, the binary world that makes a mockery of the transgender character creator, and the litany of dildos everywhere, you didn't need to look hard to find a problem with Cyberpunk 2077 at launch. That's before you get into any other complaints, such as the cut content and general gripes about gameplay. The turtle transcends all of these though, and it's the closest example of both what Cyberpunk is, and what it could be.
In a side mission you can encounter fairly near the beginning of the game, you will talk to a depressed cop who has locked himself away inside his shitty apartment. His two friends, also cops, enlist your help to talk to him. One of these cops is empathetic to mental health issues but lacks a connection with the man, while the other is much closer to him but thinks depression is just the wah-wahs and has no clue how to approach a conversation like this. All they know is the guy's friend is dead, and now he's depressed. If you say the right thing, you get to talk to the cop and figure out some more details, which is where the quest starts to get interesting.
You're given a quest marker that extends way out of town. It's highly unlikely you've been to this part of Night City at this point in the game, and will have nothing else to do out there yet. But hey, you know how video games work. Who's a smart gamer? Who's a smart little gamer? You are! Yes you are, yes you are, yes you are! Anyway, you know how they work. It's on the map, so at some point you'll head out there. Just leave the quest until then, right?
Unfortunately, it turns out you're a very stupid gamer indeed. If you do not do this quest immediately, it will update itself and reroute you back to the original quest location - the cop's apartment. Return to it and you will find the cop dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The same happens if you try to skip ahead by talking to the partners before heading to the distant marker, or by lying about what you find there. This man is severely depressed, and he asks you to do one thing for him. You tell him you'll get to it when you get to it. Well, turns out he can't wait that long.
At the time, this quest was heavily criticised, both for the lack of trigger warning and the lack of expiry warning. The trigger warning complaint I understand - we are left in no illusions that this was a graphic suicide we were at least partially responsible for, and that's an upsetting thing to be confronted with - but I also struggle with how you lace a trigger warning like that in a game that markets itself as extremely violent and explicit. Telling us upon acceptance of the quest would rob it of its power and would diminish the idea that games are art, and telling us at the start that the game features suicide probably wouldn't have been considered enough cover for a scenario like this. There's no easy answer, but it's the expiry warning I want to dig into.
This quest seems like any other, until it doesn't. If it told you to do this quest next or risk failure, it would be significantly less powerful and would ruin the point of the story. This is not the most important thing in your life. To drive all the way out of town, to help a cop you just met with his depression? You are dying of brain rot from the terrorist ghost who lives inside your head, and you just saw your only friend die in front of you. You have bigger problems. But this guy doesn't, and that's the point. It's not always about you, and the game's failure to warn us of this underlines that point. You don't know there's an expiration date on this quest until it expires.
There's no gunfire, no car chases, no action, but then most of Cyberpunk 2077's best quests don't require a single bullet. It's storytelling, not shaped by you, but shaped around you. This is why the quest is so frustrating for some - we're used to the game letting us tell the story. If we die, no we didn't. The game restarts, because we're all that matters. In this quest, we don't matter. Only the turtle matters.
But where does this turtle even come into it? This is the dark, comic genius that Cyberpunk displays in the tiniest of flashes. The quest marker you are initially sent to denotes the cop's friend's grave. You're sent there to discover more about him, in the hopes that it can help both the cop himself, and his former partners to communicate with him. You drive all the way out there and you find that the grave does not belong to a man, but to a turtle. The cop had one good thing in his life - one good turtle - and when that was taken away, everything fell apart. Find this out in time and relay that info to his partners and they will realise how deep their friend's depression is and will find a way to reach him.
There are reasons to pull down this quest. Its message is clunky, and some won't like the idea that it implies you can save people from suicide by being nice to them, or reverse implication that you can be indirectly at fault for someone else killing themselves, but the reality is for some people, that's probably true. That it's told so comically through the grave of a turtle, yet delivered with a straight-face while making a very real point perfectly encapsulates what Cyberpunk 2077 might have been had it not got in its own way. There are some great stories in Night City. It's just a shame about everything else.