I love Jeff Hays’ narrative style. The characters are still great, the series is still good, it’s still funny but this story is annoying. Once everything is explained you get it, but its used a gimmicky puzzle where the clues tell you literally nothing for a payoff that’s alright at best but it doesn’t make up for the rest of the story being a cluster fuck. You’re like, “What the hell is even going on?” There’s no legit progression aside from movement toward next to nothing, and the entire story is a mess, followed by “…..tadaaa…” I honestly didn’t even care about what was going on by the end, even with the great characters and superb voice acting I was like “just let this bullshit finish already.” It’s not like you can just ignore it, since all the characters do is act confused about shit the entire story with no real goal other than “get down more stairs.” And it’s not like you can Sherlock Holmes the ending with the shitty clues. It’s a mystery LitRPG, without anything a mystery is supposed to have.
I’m glad I listened to this one first, because without Jeff Hays, I’d have hated this one, and I loved the other books in the series.