The unpredictability of the plot and its quickening pace as the story progressed contributed to this for sure. Campbell made me care about something I had little concern for prior, which is a sure sign of successful storytelling. However, the world building and the characterisation is superb so I quickly became invested in this world. I am not a gamer, so I can’t say I was particularly interested in that aspect of the plot in the beginning. What happened to Maya? I wanted to know! Admittedly though, much of the video-gaming lingo and VR related content went over my head in the beginning. I was intrigued by the mystery from the get-go. There was also no atmosphere of sense of danger to me, so I was really it pretty emotionless.Ī Game of Life or Death is a wonderful debut. At the moment, I don’t think this book has these which is a shame. I think it could have done with being way more stripped back in terms of characters we focus on, no romance arc whatsoever because that was irrelevant and a bit of a waste of time, and more focus on slowly building up the world, setting the scene, and an unfolding of events that feels evenly paced ad leads to a satisfying conclusion that makes sense. This had a really intriguing concept but a very lacklustre execution. It took me forever to read purely because I had no interest in reading it. It was just a bit all over the place for me, and my boredom really overshadowed everything. There were a lot of characters introduced and other than their names I couldn’t tell you anything about them, or anything they did that was significant to this story. Everyone ended up feeling really too dimensional, I never felt like as a reader I had any grasp on who they really were, which then made it difficult to connect to them, care about them, and as a result have any emotional reactions to anything happening in here. She was actually quite interesting and she had a good backstory, I just think her characterisation (as well as every other characters, to be honest) ws very shaky. The most redeeming factor was arguably our protagonist. Everything was very surface level, there was almost no worldbuilding it was very simple and underdeveloped, and the pacing didn’t feel right for such an apparently high stakes novel. ![]() I don’t think the book had enough driving it forward, and for what it was trying to do it didn’t really have the depth for anything to play out in an impactful way for me. I found like we were almost in exactly the same position that we started in, and I didn’t really care either way. This book had some semblance of plot going on, but honestly even by the end I didn’t find it had any sort of satisfying resolution and I actually wondered what I had just read 350 pages for. ![]() I started reading it in physical form, but it was so dull I had to put it on audio in 3x speed and even then I was having to force myself to read it because unfortunately I just could not have cared less. I honestly really tried to give this book a fair chance because it had been compared to Ready Player One and Black Mirror (two things I love!) but I just didn’t like it. *Thank you to the publisher for gifting me a copy of this book!*
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