Book Review:
The female MC is a noob to MMORPGs (me too, I’ve never played one before) but she has a boyfriend or husband (still not sure on that one) who plays so she has picked up the gist of how they work and the lingo just by being around him. There’s a great scene where the noob is introduced to the game world and mechanics through a tutorial NPC. During that part, there’s a lot of discussion about stats. In the audio book you even hear the “ding” when she acquires a new skill or new stats. These continue through the beginning of the book as she’s leveling up. But once she’s fully on her quest, they recede into the background.
Now, some are going to argue that this would make the book GameLit, not LitRPG. I think it’s actually fairly organic to how leveling up in a game works. Though I’ve never played an MMORPG, I have played games where you achieve levels. As you first play the game, each new level is exciting because it probably opens up new abilities. But as you go higher and higher, new levels are 1) harder to achieve, 2) take longer to get and 3) don’t give you that much advantage. I mean, what really is the difference between a level 100 player and a level 101 player or even a level 110 player? So the further you get into playing, the game mechanics become second nature to you – you may even turn off notifications so that you can just play uninterrupted. This is what I think Chapman achieves by focusing less on the stats as the story unfolds. There are a few mentions of the MC swiping away the heads up screen that is blocking her view of what’s going on in the game. And in an immersive VR game like this one, those kinds of notifications do seem like they’d be annoying and quickly dismissed.
There’s a love story that is not terribly compelling. But that could just be my own prejudice against falling for someone you’ve only met online – I don’t think you can make a real connection until you’ve looked someone in the eyes and know really what they’re all about.
I like the fact that this is a beta version of the game that people payed BIG bucks to get access to. That explains the special nature-ness of the MC. It’s a common complaint that LitRPG books focus on players who get special skills or luck into things. But with only 100 people playing the game, MC has much better odds of being that special player than the books set in games with millions of players.
I like that the game is basically jacked in to her brain. I find it very hard to get into these futuristic settings where people are expected to actually run around in order to play VR games. Have authors looked around at the people who play video games or even just humans in general? They sit on the couch or in a desk chair and play for hours BECAUSE they’re only moving their hands or thumbs. If they had to stand up and run around in a VR set up, they’d play for an hour and then collapse from exhaustion.
There were some elements I personally didn’t like – I’m not a fan of underworld type characters and the MC runs into some of those. The author did her best to make them seem not blatantly evil characters, but I still would prefer a story without them. Just a warning to those who may have the same preferences.
Narrator Review:
Anneliese Rennie did a fine job with the reading. The production value is good. Sometimes there are spots in books where I can hear that a reader had to re-do a line and the audio-engineer dropped it into the chapter. The difference is small but I can hear that the background or the pace changes just slightly. I’m sure there are plenty of times when that happens and it matches so perfectly that I don’t notice it. Well, I did not hear any of those in this recording. As stated above, there was even a sound effect added to help draw attention to the game mechanics.
As for acting different voices, I’d put Rennie in the middle of the pack. She did great with some, particularly the underworld characters that I mentioned above. She put a hissing/sinister quality to her voice for those characters. She didn’t do poorly with any characters, just average on most of them. I did like her “head voice” for the MC. It was obvious when she was reading thoughts that the MC didn’t want to voice out loud to the other characters in the scene.
The only other thing I would recommend to the author and reader combination – the author is English and wrote the book with English phrasing. The reader is American but kept the English phrasing and word choices. It wouldn’t phase me if a reader with a British accent read “in hospital” or “lift” or “got sorted” or (the worst) “maths.” But those are phrases that Americans simply don’t use. So those things stood out to me when I heard an American accent say them. If an English author wants to use an American reader, I would change over to American English for the audio book. It’s a small thing but you don’t want the listener to get pulled out of the narration for such an easy fix. And you wouldn’t have to change the text of the book, just the audio book.
*****I was given a free copy of this audio book in exchange for an honest review. My review is entirely my own opinion.*****