The God Game
Ratings13
Average rating3.2
You are invited!
Come inside and play with G.O.D.
Bring your friends!
It’s fun!
But remember the rules. Win and ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE.™ Lose, you die!
With those words, Charlie and his friends enter the G.O.D. Game, a video game run by underground hackers and controlled by a mysterious AI that believes it’s God. Through their phone-screens and high-tech glasses, the teens’ realities blur with a virtual world of creeping vines, smoldering torches, runes, glyphs, gods, and mythical creatures. When they accomplish a mission, the game rewards them with expensive tech, revenge on high-school tormentors, and cash flowing from ATMs. Slaying a hydra and drawing a bloody pentagram as payment to a Greek god seem harmless at first. Fun even.
But then the threatening messages start. Worship me. Obey me. Complete a mission, however cruel, or the game reveals their secrets and crushes their dreams. Tasks that seemed harmless at first take on deadly consequences. Mysterious packages show up at their homes. Shadowy figures start following them, appearing around corners, attacking them in parking garages. Who else is playing this game, and how far will they go to win?
And what of the game’s first promise: win, win big, lose, you die? Dying in a virtual world doesn’t really mean death in real life—does it?
As Charlie and his friends try to find a way out of the game, they realize they’ve been manipulated into a bigger web they can’t escape: an AI that learned its cruelty from watching us.
God is always watching, and He says when the game is done.
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When I first got the ARC for this book, I was quite hype to get into it. I love playing video games almost as much as i love reading. Almost. So i was ready for this.
I debated hard about giving it 3.5 or 4 stars. The biggest reason being that I didn't really care about the teenaged crew of gamers. I didn't hate them and they didn't annoy me. I just didn't care. And for a book of roughly 500 pages I feel like maybe I should have cared about someone, anyone more. But I'll stick with 4 stars because the story had a great pace, and the suspense was there. At least for me it was. And I can't really say that it dragged anywhere for me. I would definitely love to see this turned into a tv show.
This book is probably a 3.5 for me. The premise is clever enough - an AI augmented reality game built to determine morality and test it and the acts that this leads a group of school kids to do as they become more immersed and addicted to the game. The ideas of what people can be persuaded to do is an interesting concept - the morality of the crowd is quite different to what is individually preached after all. Peer pressure can persuade people to do beastly things. The bulk of the books play around this theme is extremely clever and interesting.
Unfortunately it is let down in the end by a couple of bits of lazy story telling and an utterly unnecessary final chapter - the ambiguity left by missing out that chapter would probably have served the story much better than the final chapter does. This chapter falls very much into ‘and then they woke up' school of lazy endings. The chapter structure in the book is also slightly odd and jarring with extremely short chapters which are not necessarily forming natural breaks in the flow of the story - a slightly jarring thing to read.
However, other than this slightly jarring structure and one lazy storytelling trope in the final chapter the book is on the whole excellent. The theme is brilliantly realized, the prose easy to read, the characters interesting and the story reads in a very satisfying way. It could easily have been a 4 or 4.5 without the final chapter!
Not the type of LitRPG I've been reading but still quite good, at least for the first two thirds. After that the story tanks a bit imo.
