Grimes' Cyberpunk 2077 character should come with a trigger warning

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Claire "Grimes" Boucher has a role in CD Projekt Red's much-hyped Cyberpunk 2077, and she may have spoiled everything there is to know about her character more than half a year before the game is released.

Grimes DGAF.

In a Saturday livestream to promote her new album, Miss Anthropocene, Grimes let slip a few details about the character she's playing in Cyberpunk 2077. She previously only teased the character, who is some kind of cyborg pop star, in a December 2019 tweet. The character's background story, however, now seems so much darker than we could've possibly imagined.

Even though the livestream has since been taken down, Reddit user Ros96 transcribed what Grimes said about her role in the game, revealing some critical details about a character named Lizzy Wizzy.

Spoilers ahead that also reference suicide.

"I play a pop star who committed suicide on stage," Grimes said, "and they had to quickly come and perform emergency surgery and replace her whole body with cybernetics while she was dead for an hour and then she finished the show as a cyborg." Grimes called it "one of the greatest pieces of performance art ever made" and said that Cyberpunk 2077 "is going to be fucking good" based on her watching someone play an hour of the game.

Grimes' character offers an interesting examination at the transhumanist ideas often present in cyberpunk fiction where the human mind can live on with a cybernetic body. It remains to be seen if players will experience her character's dramatic, grisly transformation directly by playing it out in-game or if this is just backstory to her character that happened before the game takes place. Either way, it's still incredibly dark. A key facet of the game will see players upgrade their body with various kinds of cybernetic enhancements, and in some cases, entire human bodies are replaced with robotic parts. That seems to be the case for Lizzy Dizzy based on the only image released of her.

Polygon reports that Lizzy is "the controversial frontwoman for the band Lizzy Wizzy and the Metadwarves," so we also know that she's not a one-woman act, and the outlet also noticed that "Death at Lizzy Wizzy Concert" popped up as a headline in the original E3 2018 demo. This seems to imply that this grisly event happens during the game but perhaps off-camera.

With Grimes lackadaisically telling us just about everything there is to know about her character, that means we know more about Lizzy Wizzy than anyone else from Cyberpunk 2077, even more than Keanu Reeves' beloved cyborg. Developer CD Projekt Red is being fairly secretive about specific story details for the new game, and the release date delay from April to September has only increased anticipation and hype for the title.

Grimes is also contributing to the game's soundtrack alongside the likes of Run the Jewels, Refused, ASAP Rocky, Gazelle Twin, Ilan Rubin, Richard Devine, Nina Kraviz, Deadly Hunta, Rat Boy, and Tina Guo. It seems likely that Grimes' track might be presented in-game as Lizzy Dizzy's, but that remains to be seen.

Cyberpunk 2077 will be release on September 17, 2020.