Book review: Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence by Rafał Kosik

Good news, Cyberpunk 2077 fans: the first official tie-in novel for the hit video game from CD Projekt Red is out now on bookstore shelves! Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence is a mind-bending heist book by the influential Polish science fiction author Rafał Kosik. It’s a standalone story set amid the neon lights and gang-infested streets of Night City, similar in tone to the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners animated series from Studio Trigger.

If you’re an adrenaline junky who can’t get enough of the Cyberpunk world, this is definitely a book you’ll want to check out. Below is our spoiler-free review.

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence is a fun but strangely futile addition to the video game universe

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence is a tight, breakneck story that fits right in with the video game and animated series. It follows a typical gang of Night City misfits: a mercenary with a mysterious past, a ripperdoc who needs to pay off debts, a corpo with a kink for putting themself in danger, a netrunner trying to transcend the bonds of the human body and a stripper desperate to escape her former life. The crew is brought together for a seemingly simple job by a fixer who has dirt on each of them. But you know how these things go in Night City: one job leads to more and things spiral further and further out of control.

I had mixed feelings about Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence. Characters like Zor and Aya are entertaining to read about, but ultimately bring little to Night City that we haven’t seen before. This is a standalone story that requires no knowledge of what happens in the video game or the Edgerunners anime, despite having plentiful nods to the former. While that might sound like a good thing, it left me feeling ambivalent about the book as a whole.

Since No Coincidence is the second piece of Cyberpunk tie-in media CD Projekt Red has produced, it’s hard not to compare it to Edgerunners. The anime was a haunting story that expanded on Cyberpunk 2077 in a few very specific, meaningful ways. It was filled with emotional gut punches and characters you came to genuinely care about. When that series ended, there was a feeling that you’d learned about a hidden corner of Night City that was previously unexplored.

I didn’t get that feeling with No Coincidence. Kosik is a skilled writer who excels at pulling the strings ever tighter, and there’s no doubt that this is a sharply crafted novel. Were it just a standalone science fiction book, I’d probably have liked it a lot more than I did. But since it’s a Cyberpunk 2077 book, I kept asking myself why this story in particular needed to be told when there are so many other fascinating characters and side stories to choose from. What does No Coincidence add to the overall mythos of the series?

The answer is that it doesn’t really add much at all. In fact, that futility is kind of the point of the novel. We won’t spoil things, but it suffices to say that No Coincidence is a bleak, pulse-pounding book that drives home the idea that there are no happy endings in Night City. In that way, it fits perfectly with the rest of the Cyberpunk 2077 universe.

But that can also make it difficult to wrap your head around as a reader. The grim tone keeps you somewhat at arm’s length from the characters. I did enjoy them, and there were some great standouts, especially Milena and the various Maelstrom gang members who crop up. But on the whole, everyone is pretty selfish and most are willing to screw over anyone for their own aims.

While that can be fun at times and certainly adds to the tension in key moments, it also left me just not really caring very much by the time I reached the novel’s mind-bending ending. Part of what made nihilistic Night City stories like the video game or anime work is that we came to care so much about the characters before things got bad. No Coincidence had some great moments, but I didn’t feel pulled into the narrative in the same way I’ve come to expect from a Cyberpunk 2077 story.

I enjoyed reading No Coincidence, and it’s easy to recommend for fans of the series . If you like Cyberpunk 2077, there’s no doubt that this book is worth a look. Just don’t go into it expecting that it will reshape your view on Night City or reveal anything we haven’t already seen before.

Verdict

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence brings the world of the hit video game series to life on the page, giving readers a taste of what it’s like to live on the mean streets of Night City. However, its story is largely siloed off from the rest of the franchise’s mythos, and its characters and bleak ideas sometimes feel like retreading ground we’ve already seen covered in Cyberpunk 2077. Think of it as a self-contained side quest that is fully complete by its gut-churning ending.

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence is out now from Orbit Books, wherever books are sold.

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