I’m gonna be completely honest; the game is pretty much unplayable, but the built-in BlackBerry keyboard works and that should count for something.
If you’re following along with me on this journey to find out some cool hacker technique, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Instead, I just booted the game up on Stadia via Chrome on Android. This does mean that you can play any game on Stadia with a BlackBerry keyboard.
I had to force the Stadia website to run in desktop mode, and I had no real mouse support, but with a little help from the Stadia controller, I was able to walk around Night City with ease from the comfort of a BlackBerry keyboard.
When I first attempted to do this, I plugged a USB-C to USB-A adapter into my KEYone and connected a wireless mouse. This worked for everything except for the actual gameplay, meaning I could navigate Android with a mouse, Open Stadia, and even open Cyberpunk with my mouse, but I couldn’t use it to look around or interact with the game in any way.
After that attempt failed, I tried logging into the game via Stadia on my PC to see if I could tweak the game to be all keyboard. Sadly this wasn’t an option either.
The final workaround, which I found worked surprisingly well, was to play with one hand on the BlackBerry and the other on a Stadia controller. This sounds convoluted, but in practice, it’s not that bad. It even allows you to easily use a gun. I ended up remapping my aim down site key to ‘U’ to toggle that while still walking.
Obviously, this isn’t the best or even a reasonable way to play any video game, but since we’re a Canadian tech blog, we need to write about BlackBerry at least three times a year, So I’m just wrapping up our 2020 quota.
That said, seeing the game running on the tiny KEYone screen is weirdly awesome, and I wish I could actually play the game on the phone some way. Even if it was just a walking mode that allowed me to explore the city, it would be fun to do on the go with Stadia’s power and the KEYone’s built-in keyboard.
