Right from the start I should say that this anthology is not newcomer friendly. It’s not where you should start your journey with the franchise. While you’re offered a brief introduction to the world at start, I also feel like I got spoiled some major plot points along the way. Well, currently I have no way of knowing how canon are the events of this novel and how relevant to plot of the game they are, but it certainly felt like some truth bombs were mentioned quite casually, the author assuming you are already familiar with these facts.
About the content, the stories are quite usual kind of “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” kind, more or less with similar quality among them, though I do have my favourite chapter (“A much too silent sea”). A lot of them felt like just a middle part of the story, without much introduction and most importantly, without much conclusion. I imagine with context of having played the game, the introduction might not be necessary, and the conclusion might also be deductionable. Alas, that was not my case. Additionally, I didn’t feel like the stories did much above average for these kind of stories “Uuuh robots have feeling too and shit, man”, but that too maybe could have been more enjoyable if I was already familiar with the world setting.
As I’ve already mentioned, this doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of book enjoyable on its own. Maybe once I play the game I could update this review on how my view changed, though even then I wouldn’t expect my score to raise above 7/10.
