This one is… difficult. I love the story, and how it broadens and contextualizes the story of the main game. I adore the location, which as a singular place works well to integrate it in the setting, but leads to a lot of “same way backtracking”. I hate the spatial puzzles, but all of them can be cheesed into nonexistence (even without looking anything up, the things you need to add up are there but not obvious).

What still bugs me most is that one very important information was conveyed so convoluted that I did not catch it, and that massively derailed my playthrough.
Is it a good DLC? Yes.
Is it as great as the base game? No, but your mileage may vary.

The third book of the Sprawl-Trilogy… I don’t want to say “wraps up”, because that’s not what’s happening, but it finishes telling the events set in motion with the Straylight-run.

It brings back characters from the other two, mostly as companions for the POV-characters of this one, and gives closure on some others, and a bunch of context on how the events at Straylight and the Matrix-entities of the second book connect to each other. The ending is a lot of “everyone riding into their own sunset” and the book is mostly the ways there, but as the closing title of a trilogy it works pretty well.

It also would not work well standing alone, so… go read the Sprawl books. They sure are Something, and I think they hold up pretty well.

Where the first book of the Sprawl-trilogy was very narrowly focused on Case, the band of runners he got pressed into, and the Straylight-run, the second book takes a vastly different approach: it follows the stories of Turner, a, uhm, freelance career-change agent, Bobby, the titular Count Zero and a wannabe-decker, and Marly, a former gallerist finding herself exceedingly gainfully employed.
Their stories do converge in the end, but it takes quite a while for the connections to become apparent.
What connects them all is that they have to deal, one way or the other, with the fall-out from the Straylight-run and the new entities hounding the Matrix.

It can be read on its own, especially since it is only very loosely connected to Neuromancer, but it would give context.

Technically a re-read, but also the first time I’ve read this fundamental, genre-building piece of cyberpunk in the english version.

Contrasting it to the before-finished Fortunate Fall, it does become painfully obvious why the latter was rec’d as “non-tech bro-y” – Neuromancer is very tech, and sometimes painfully bro-y.

Still, it is A Ride, and a damn good one at that, if you’re willing to deal with it.
Also, I completely forgot how much of this book is the actual Straylight run, but then in terms of misremembering plot points that’s by far not the biggest whoops I’ve made xD

And now: deeper into the Sprawl! There’s two more books in the trilogy, after all.

This one was recommended as a non-techbro-y cyberpunk novel, and that’s a pretty good description.

It follows the story of a journalist trying to uncover the story of an immense genocide, and in the process finding out about all the many unseen ramifications it and its aftermath hold over society.

It’s a good read, not a fun one, and you all should go and read it.

After reading Dracula a while ago I made the plan to also read the other works of historic vampire fiction, and Carmilla is in many points quite clearly an inspiration (and known to be one) for Stokers far more well known work.

To actually say I have not a lot: it’s a vampire story. It’s good. It’s old enough to be on Project Gutenberg, so you have no excuse to not read it yourselves.

This is.. so good.
You play as the inhabitant of a (very small) solar system, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. And that’s all I can say without spoilers.
The game has a knowledge-based progression system, so you need to piece the fact together based on what you learn, with locations usually providing hints on how to deal with other locations, in a way that it doesn’t really matter in which order you go which places.

I highly recommend playing it, and to go in there with as little prior knowledge as you humanly can. (And if you’re getting stuck, the subreddit is very good at giving hints instead of solutions.)

I am now diving into the Echoes of the Eye-expansion, so… let’s see how that goes.

The second book of the Silo trilogy is just as much of a page-turner as the first one.

It starts in more-or-less current times and expands along several locations and timeslines on the background of the setting, detailing why the situation is the way it is, and just *how* fucked everything is.
It does this very well, it ups the stakes, it provides a ton of background lore, and really has me looking forward for the endgame in Dust.