The World of Cyberpunk 2077

I’ve been having a bit of a rough time recently but with the release of Phantom Liberty for Cyberpunk 2077 I was ready to ignore my problems and spend some time in a fictional world where pretty much everyone and everything is worse off. This has been fun and the world and lore of this game are captivating, however most of it is found in forms of short texts stored on data shards across the world. Not only did this mean I had to take breaks from playing simply to scroll through hundreds of short texts hoping that they’d be interesting (which isn’t always a given as there’s a lot of fluff text and fairly uninteresting conversation logs), but when I did find an interesting one, it would be a 5-line exerpt of a larger story leaving me wanting to learn more. This is how I ended up with The World of Cyberpunk 2077 by Marcin Batylda who also put together The World of The Witcher, CD Project Red’s other video game franchise. I was hoping to be able to learn much more about the background of this world and how its History diverted from ours.

To speak of style before diving into the substance, the book is presented as in-universe online report and encyclopedia. Every chapter is interspersed by an editor’s note and the book is covered with little details like fake audio ports, advertisement URLs and data corruption errors giving it all the appearance of something you’d read on an in-game website. This is at first glance a spared no expense print with every second page being either white text on black background or sublime full page artworks. What lets the style in the end is the inconsistency of the artwork; whilst the full-page ones will always be highly stylised and detailed concept art of the game, all other smaller artwork alternates between other concept art, in-game screenshots and oddly poorly rendered 3D models. There is one expense that was spared and that’s making art specifically for this book, wherever concept art wasn’t available whatever game screenshot could do the job was put in instead and it cheapens the whole experience. However, I didn’t buy this hoping for a concept art collection, I wanted to learn more about the lore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got from it. Whilst the background from the years 2000 to 2077 is covered, it is done so in a very shallow manner, the text of a single page can cover a period as long as 40 years only giving a very high level overview of the events leading up to 2077. To only name one example, the downfall of the first Net (the internet of today if you want) is a key event mentioned and explored in multiple ways in the game but is only briefly mentioned in a few sentences in this book. As such this is neither a replacement to reading the in-game data shards nor is it a particularly good way of diving deeper into the background lore or the actual History of the world.

The majority of the book is hence focused on what is on the cover: the current world of Cyberpunk in the year 2077 and more specifically within the limits of Night City. A section is dedicated to each area of the city which did at least teach me some new things about their socio-economic situations. Additionally to that are sections focused on the cybernetics, the big players whether it be the corporations or the gangs, the weapons and…the cars? This is where the book started losing me a bit, whilst going into the history and activities of each corporation and gang was interesting and seemed like something worth mentioning, the sections covering and weapons and cars felt extremely video-gamey and unfortunately clash with the whole in-universe report style the book was going for. Going over the different brands of guns and military technologies available made sense but then a paragraph is dedicated to usefulness of steel pipes and baseball bats in a pinch because “hey that’s an available weapon in the game so we need to mention it”, but it feels simply out of place. Similarly, the car section is actually titled transport but the editor’s note informs the reader that there’s not enough time to go over flying vehicles, drones or aquatic vehicles so only cars will be covered, a thin veil to hide the truth that aside from cars, no other transport is available to the player in-game.

Finally, the ending needs to be mentioned as the book falls flat. The last chapter is an interview with a prominent character and as the interview ends, so does the book. There is no final editor’s note, no summary and the last sentence hardly is some form of mic dropping moment inviting the reader to delve into the game, it all just ends. So, overall The World of Cyberpunk 2077 is a bit disappointing, it’s got a unique style that it breaks through inconsistent writing and image quality, it’s much shallower than what it promises to be, and it even has more typos and grammatical mistakes than I would judge acceptable. However, it is a good time, it’s a relaxing exploration of the world of the video game, it reads easily and when it’s got access to good artwork it looks great, it’s just a shame that in the end it feels more like a fancy looking yet cheaply made advertisement for the game.