I enjoy the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. I have over 300 hours in the video game by CD Projekt Red. I loved Edgerunners, the animated series on Netflix. That’s why it pains me that the novel by Rafal Kosik didn’t hit me the same way.

I know exactly why: there’s too much noise. The story hops among the interactions of the main characters who form a rag-tag group in search of more eddies: Zor, a veteran who’s probably the most normal one out of the group; Aya, an exotic dancer who has unique cyberware modifications; Milena, a corporate agent who doesn’t quite belong in the streets; Ron, a ripperdoc who’s trying to claw his way into a better class of clientele; Albert, a green netrunner who is a teenager still living with his mother; and Borg, a cybernetically enhanced wild man with a hot head. However, it also gives bandwidth to secondary characters: Carla, Dixie, Dum Dum, Katsuo, Liam Reed, Renner, Stanley, Warden… am I missing anyone? It’s a lot to track.

Adding insult to injury, Kosik tries to mimic the frenetic pace in the Cyperpunk world by jumping into these characters’ heads throughout the chapters at seemingly random points, which I found more confusing than entertaining. Sometimes the reader is plopped in the middle of their mundane lives; sometimes we are thrown into a mission without context; sometimes it was something to do with the main story. It gives the reader more insight into each of the characters and moves things along, but when you’re following something like thirteen characters through twenty jumps in a single chapter, it gets rough.

It didn’t help that a lot of the characters aren’t unique enough to discern from each other. Milena’s a main character, but we learn little about her beyond that she’s a corporate stooge looking to spice up her life with crime, I guess. Borg is a hothead, but this doesn’t seem to lead to much friction among the group or otherwise. Zor and Aya are the two we spend the most time with and have the most interesting stories (well, Zor, at least), but we don’t truly learn about them until the final quarter of the book because there’s so much fluff surrounding them.

Don’t get me started on the MacGuffin…

Ultimately, Kosik wanted to write a character piece, but there were too many of them for the reader to sink their teeth into. Fewer, more interesting characters would have allowed this story to shine. As it is now, it’s an ok cyberpunk story set in the Cyberpunk world.