The Witcher Connections

How did Cyberpunk fans figure all this out? Through weaponized ADHD, says the equally ADHD-afflicted writer, many things are possible. But there’s an added wrinkle to Polyhistor’s obsession with FF:06:B5, and it’s hidden in Geralt of Rivia’s stomping grounds.

Just as the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update remixed this mystery, the Winter 2022 next-gen update for The Witcher III tossed a flashbang at busy detectives. In that game, hidden in Velen’s Destroyed Bastion, is an ouroboros symbol that features the same cyber-lines as Night City’s statues, a series of runes that translate, roughly, into something tantalizingly close to FF06B5, and a magenta-hued centerpiece.

Add in a conversation Ciri has with Geralt where she appears to describe Night City (a debatable but fun detail) and something funky is clearly going on. It could mean that The Witcher can transcend its own fictionality because that classic game is…well, a classic game that is referenced by magazines lying around Night City. Is this just CD Projekt being meta? Are they teasing future entries? Strap in, because things only get weirder from here.

V’s story of survival happens in a world built on top of some of the most famous cyberpunk stories in history, and it’s flooded with the same metafictional commentary as one of those stories: The Matrix.

The fact that The Witcher exists in Cyberpunk 2077 should get even the most non-literature-savvy fan already wondering about what’s “real” and what’s fiction inside Night City. For instance, Johnny Silverhand is, as Alt Cunningham confirms, the unreliable narrator at your side for the whole game. But he’s not the only unreality at work. Like Keanu Reeves’s Neo, Johnny’s problems (and yours) throughout the game include rogue AI interference. 

Garry the Prophet, an NPC a player can find early on, is a conspiracy theorist dedicated to warning others about observers from space, lizard people, and more. It’s wild stuff, but the hell of it is that he turns out to be right. He’s abducted by blue-eyed men during The Prophet’s Song because his borked implants had been listening in on secret conversations.