Content Warnings:

Graphic: Suicide, Grief, Grooming, Medical Scenes, Gun Violence, Homophobia, Blood, Cancer, Injury Detail, Misogyny, Racism Moderate: Gore, Domestic Abuse

While the writing for the characters was ok, and there was a pretty well written scene, this book suffers pretty badly from a severe lack of care towards the industry and especially the developers. It being marketed as a book for people not into games is pretty accurate, and it doesn't even try that hard to get people interested in games either.

To start with, the good: I did enjoy some of the characters at points. The disability rep and how the characters (mostly) interacted felt pretty realistic. I also quite enjoyed a specific scene which I'm not going to spoil, but it is quite well written and honestly was quite nice to read. It's presented in a decently unique way and executed decently well.

And now, the negative: Starting off with the bad parts for the characters, the main 2 can often be incredibly insufferable at points. Additionally, the book glamorises a teacher/student relationship and grooming. I could not believe just how hard this book tries to redeem Dov and constantly explain away and excuse his LITERAL GROOMING. Even at the end of the book he's being defended and loved... even after there's been quite a lot of abuse seen from him throughout the book?? It's not even like the character has a form of stockholm syndrome or something, the way the book is written defends Dov's actions and lifts him up.

Additionally, this book doesn't really do much to bring people not into games, into games. It keeps pushing the narrative of "violent games make violent people" (and Gabrielle, half life 2 is not a violent shooter lmao). I went to a bookclub for this book, everyone else didn't have much of an interest in games. I went to just try and give some context to things as a game dev, but was instead met with a lot of hostility. This book seemed to take their already negative opinions of games, and boost/validate that.

If you know about games as well, the timeline makes absolutely no sense. For most of the book, I had no idea when it was set. And there wasn't really much point to mess with timelines? Why couldn't the MMORPG have a realistic timeline instead of the incredibly short time it had? Why couldn't games have their actual release dates instead of saying they released at the same time? Like it would have changed nothing with how much this book hops around time to just be accurate other than make it make sense to those who know those details.

It also never actually tried to have a proper conversation about crunch, women having credit stolen from them (see next paragraph lmao) and just how fucked the industry is and was getting over the timeline of this book. Like it attempted to bring up these issues, but nothing ever actually got resolved. Especially the crediting problem, which was pushed at me as being the main point of the book lmao? The only thing this book cares about is the romantic dance between Sadie and Sam and the constant "will they won't they".

And for the kicker: "Solution" in the book is a real board game called "Train" created by Brenda Romero. Even the description Sadie gives about Solution is exactly how Brenda described her game. It took both Wired and NYT asking the author after Brenda came out about it all, after release, if she knew about Train for her to finally admit that yes she did know about the board game and yes it was an "inspiration". The copy of this book I read still does not include a credit, despite many many books and games being credited. (Though, for all the acknowledgments tries to absolve itself, Eric Barone is the (mainly) sole developer of stardew valley. It was created by him, not just "designed by". If you can put that harvest's moons creator "created" that, you can put that Eric created SV).

While the ending of this book is touting about how less crunchy things are and "oh wow more women!" in those years the ending is set in, this was happening in ubisoft: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250310-former-ubisoft-bosses-on-trial-in-france-over-alleged-harassment-1 Don't try and start a conversation about a topic you have no care to actually learn about.

We need books on these topics, but we need it written by someone who actually gives a shit. We need fiction based on the games industry and this book honestly proves that even more. You do not need to go technical with it, it can very easily stay accessible for those who don't know much about games. Fiction can be used for a lot of good, to help break stereotypes, to help dispel myths.. This book does none of that and instead helps push the negativity.