First, a caveat:
My 5 star rating could be inflated by half a star as I normally try to reserve the 5-bangers for books that are truly a cut above in language, performance and craft. I don’t know that this book quite meets those specific standards, but what I do know is that I kept checking the remaining time to ensure that there was more time left. The whole way through I just wanted to hear more, and I dreaded the ending like Grover did with the monster at the end of his book.

Ok, now on with the review…

The most noticeable difference between the first book and this one is that Sound Booth Theater did a much better job of integrating the sound design with the narration. A lot of this was accomplished by just mixing the sound effects much lower in the audio mix compared to the level of the narrators’ voices.

I’m still not sold on the value of the sound effects in particular, but also on the idea of any additional audio save for the narrator in general. If done well, some manipulation of the character voices might be alright if used sparingly, but on the whole it’s the authors’ job to put all of the necessary cues and nuance into the writing and the narrators’ job to bring the character’s voices to life. If the author and narrator have done their jobs well, then any additional audio will be superfluous and only serve to distract the listener. That idea is applicable to this audiobook… I can’t say that the additional effects improved the experience, but I can say for sure that it was still distracting at times. Even so, I will at least give SBT the nod for doing a better, more subtle job this time around.

As for the writing… it’s sadly refreshing when an author in this genre writes and releases a book which is both engaging and also long enough to tell a fully fleshed-out story… a novel that doesn’t feel like it has been arbitrarily cut off 2/3’s of the way through the story arc. It seems like many other authors in the GameLit genre are either content to release episodes rather than full books or are happy to cut what would be one complete volume into two or three 6 to 8-hour chunks which they release 1 or 2 months apart. This trend just makes you feel like you’re being milked for credits and leads to several, less-than-satisfying listens as opposed to one solid experience.

So thumbs up to Mr. Willmarth for not following along with many of his peers and writing a book that really hit the spot… In fact I’m going to start supporting him on Patreon right now to put my money where my mouth is. I encourage other listeners to do the same in order to reward those authors whose integrity and commitment to their art has over-ruled the base commercialism that seems to have afflicted so many other authors in this genre.

…5 bucks a month is worth it to encourage and support authors who all too often have to find time to write in the evenings and on weekends because they don’t make enough to feed their families from writing alone.