Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t end with a boss fight. It ends with a conversation. Once you walk into Embers to meet Hanako Arasaka, the game quietly locks the door behind you. A few hours later you’re on the roof of Misty’s Esoterica with Johnny Silverhand, a fistful of pills, and a menu of options that was assembled silently, without the game ever telling you out of everything you did in the fifty hours before. Skip Panam’s questline and one option simply isn’t there. Never go drinking with Rogue and another one is missing too.
That’s the part most guides bury. The endings aren’t chosen at the end. They’re chosen throughout.
Heavy spoilers ahead for the base game and Phantom Liberty.
The short version
There are four ending paths you can reach from that rooftop, one secret variation, one opt-out, and one that exists only if you own Phantom Liberty. Seven distinct credit rolls. And in the base game, none of them cures V.
What the game is actually checking
Three things decide what appears on that rooftop menu.
Side jobs you finished. Panam’s chain, which ends with Queen of the Highway, unlocks the Aldecaldos route. Rogue’s chain Chippin’ In and Blistering Love unlocks the Afterlife route. Hanako’s offer is always available; it’s the fallback for anyone who bulldozed the main story.
Dialogue you picked hours earlier. The secret ending hinges almost entirely on a short run of lines at Johnny’s grave in the Northern Oil Fields, long before the finale.
One decision inside Mikoshi. After the assault, V and Johnny have a last argument on a bridge in the net: V takes the body back, or Johnny keeps it. That single choice splits every route in two.
Save manually before Embers. That is the point of no return, and the autosave is not always generous about where it drops you.
The Devil the corporate handshake
You take Hanako’s deal and storm Arasaka Tower with corporate backing. It’s the only ending available to a player who did no side content at all, which is precisely why it feels so hollow. V survives the raid, wakes in an Arasaka orbital facility, and is offered a place in the company’s engram archive become data, and maybe the company finds you a body someday. Whatever you choose, the doctors give V six months.
One detail decides how this plays out: Goro Takemura. During Search and Destroy, the HUD nudges you to leave the building. Ignore it and go back upstairs, and he lives. If Takemura dies, Arasaka’s support thins out, Oda never shows, and Anders Hellman handles the final offer instead. The Devil achievement won’t unlock without him.
The Star the road out
Call Panam from the rooftop. The Aldecaldos hit the tower from below, V takes the body back in Mikoshi, and the epilogue, All Along the Watchtower, has the convoy roll out of Night City into the badlands with V alive in the back of a truck.
It’s the most hopeful ending the game offers, and it is still not a happy one. There’s no cure only distance, a family that chose you, and a clock. For a lot of players this is the ending that fits the theme best Night City takes everything, so the win is leaving with anything at all.
The Sun the legend
Rogue’s route. Finish Chippin’ In and Blistering Love, ask her for help on the roof, and V returns from Mikoshi to find Rogue dead and the Afterlife handed over. The epilogue, Path of Glory, ends with V boarding a shuttle for the Crystal Palace heist the job that made Johnny a myth, now V’s turn, with six months on the meter.
This is the ending for players who bought into Dexter DeShawn’s opening question and answered “legend.”
Temperance Johnny keeps the body
Temperance isn’t picked on the rooftop. It’s picked on that bridge inside Mikoshi, on either the Panam or Rogue route, when V hands the body to Johnny and steps into the net with Alt Cunningham. The epilogue, New Dawn Fades, follows Johnny in V’s body he visits Misty, gets told to leave the city alone, and drives out under someone else’s name.
It’s the quietest ending in the game and the one that lands hardest if you actually liked Johnny by the end.
(Don’t Fear) The Reaper the secret run
The secret ending has a reputation for being affinity-gated. In practice, what matters is the dialogue at Johnny’s grave during Chippin’ In the lines where V calls him out and then forgives him. High affinity usually comes along for the ride, which is why the 70% number stuck.
With that done, reach the rooftop, pick “Think you and Rogue should go”, then do nothing. Sit there for roughly five minutes. Johnny will eventually say that deciding which friend dies for you is a hell of a thing, and offer a two-person suicide run. Take it.
What follows is Arasaka Tower solo, at cyberpunk endgame difficulty, with no checkpoint mercy die and you’re back before Embers. Nobody you love dies for you. Rogue survives and meets you at the Afterlife afterwards with a job from Mr. Blue Eyes. The run feeds into modified versions of The Sun or Temperance rather than being a separate destination.
Path of Least Resistance the opt-out
On the rooftop you can end it there, before the chip finishes the job. It’s the shortest ending in the game, it unlocks nothing, and it’s clearly built as a statement about despair rather than a route anyone is meant to “achieve.” Worth knowing it exists; not worth a playthrough.
The Tower Phantom Liberty’s price
Phantom Liberty adds the only ending in which V is cured, and it charges for it.
You reach it by handing Songbird to the FIA either by siding with Reed throughout, or by siding with Songbird and then turning her over at the spaceport. Reed’s promise is real: the NUSA has the Neural Matrix. It also skips Nocturne Op55N1 entirely, so The Tower and the base-game finales are mutually exclusive in a single save.
The surgery works. V wakes up two years later. Johnny is gone. The nervous system damage means serious cyberware would kill V, which in Night City means the merc career is over permanently. Judy has moved to Philadelphia. Panam won’t return calls. Misty’s Esoterica is a Zetatech storefront with Viktor working the counter for the corp. The game closes with V once the most dangerous person in the city shoved down a flight of stairs by two nobodies, then saying goodbye to Misty as she leaves for Poland.
It’s the most divisive ending CDPR has written, and probably the most honest one.
Which ending is “best”?
There’s no canon. CD Projekt Red has never declared one, and with the sequel in development they have every reason not to.
Community consensus, for what it’s worth, tends to sort like this: The Star for players who wanted V to have a future, (Don’t Fear) The Reaper for players who wanted the story’s themes paid off in full, The Tower for players who think Night City should win. The Devil is nearly universally read as the failure state.
The better question is the one Dexter asks in the first hour: live a quiet life, or go out in a blaze of glory. Every ending here is a different answer to that, and the game is careful never to tell you which one was right.
Before you walk into Embers a checklist
- Make a manual save. Not a quicksave.
- Finish Panam’s chain through Queen of the Highway if you want The Star.
- Finish Chippin’ In and Blistering Love if you want The Sun.
- Pick the forgiving dialogue at Johnny’s grave if you want the secret run.
- Go back upstairs for Takemura in Search and Destroy.
- Finish Judy’s, River’s and Kerry’s questlines they change the phone calls in the epilogue.
- Play Phantom Liberty first if The Tower is on your list.