Cyberpunk 2077’s big summer trailer: Braindance your way into Keanu

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  It's unclear how this Keanu-ization plays out, but the first-person hands mirror those of Keanu standing above you. [credit: CD Projekt Red ]

As this summer's E3-like wave of trailers and hype continues, Cyberpunk 2077 is next to take center stage with a new gameplay trailer and developer walkthrough. Sadly, the devs at CD Projekt Red weren't as forthcoming on Thursday with gameplay as we'd hoped, but today's news at least explores one gameplay mechanic lifted from the series' pen-and-paper origins: "braindancing."

The first-person adventure game, slated to launch this November, will dive into characters' histories by using an augmented reality interface. It surprisingly resembles the critically acclaimed game Remember Me (or, to a lesser extent, the Batman Arkham series). Players will freeze and swipe through time while examining the timeline of a given moment (which you access in the game's lore because of a recovered "recording implant"). View things from the implanted person's perspective, then check for security cameras and other content within your environs for more context.

CDPR devoted a substantial amount of its presentation to how this narrative-focused mechanic works, while the sizzle trailer was more bombastic, with only a hint to where the braindance mechanic may take you: into the shoes of Keanu Reeves. The sequence ends with the famed actor's Cyberpunk character mirroring your motions before vanishing. How exactly that will play out—either reliving his character's experiences or actually playing as his character—remains to be seen.

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