Apart from being a genuinely good game—something no one would have predicted after its disastrous launch—Cyberpunk 2077 has become something of a laboratory for pushing the bounds of graphical hardware. YouTube is full of videos where people have plugged their RTX 5090s straight into a nearby power plant and created insanely detailed 8K videos wherein Night City really does almost look like a real-life city from the future.
Almost. But not quite. And the thing is, unless VR breaks out of its 15-year “it’s going to a be a thing this time!” cycle and actually becomes a thing, it seems there’ll always be a fundamental disconnection between game graphics—no matter how true they are to life—and, y’know, life. There are many reasons for this, but one is that there’s actually something vaguely disconcerting about looking at 99% realistic graphics. Part of this is the well-documented Uncanny Valley phenomenon, but there’s another, simpler reason, too: nothing else on our screens looks like this.
Most TV programs and films arrive in much lower fidelity than the hyper-detailed Night City videos available online. Movies, for example, have a certain look, and as much as anything, it’s because of their frame rate. Did you ever see Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit in 60 fps? It looks like a second-rate daytime TV soap opera or a sports broadcast, because those are the places in which we’re used to seeing footage play at that frame rate.
So, perhaps by making games look less real, we can paradoxically make them feel more real. This seems to be the idea behind TapePunk, a new ReShade mod for Cyberpunk 2077 that uses a combination of custom and built-in shaders to reproduce some vintage-y camera presets. There’s one that evokes old security camera footage and another called “found boxes of VHS.” The presets are clearly a labor of love, and they largely look great.
Conceptually, Cyberpunk is an awkward fit for this idea: for a start, the whole idea of VHS footage even existing in 2077 seems questionable. Similarly, the game’s first-person perspective sits uncomfortably with the idea of simulated camera footage, although you can certainly construct a headcanon that explains the situation: perhaps the footage is from a body camera or something.
Even so, the mod looks the most convincing when you’re observing things from a distance—either when your character is using their ability to hack security cameras and peer out from behind their lenses, or when they’re driving. Switch your car view to third person, and suddenly it’s like you’re watching a real Porsche 911 rocket along the highway in a manner that reveals it’s clearly being driven by a massive dickhead. (Which, in this case, it is, because your correspondent is at the virtual wheel.)
I’m not sure I’d want to try an entire playthrough with the game looking like this, but ultimately, I don’t think that’s really the point. As well as just looking cool in Photo Mode, this mod is an experiment in stepping out of the constant Realism Arms Race and looking at a fictional world through another, ahem, lens—and in that respect, it’s a winner.
