When the game is broken, the rules don't matter. You need to discover the REAL rules.
Sarah's boyfriend Mike has been kidnapped and trapped into a virtual reality game. She must enter the virtual multiverse to rescue him... but she quickly discovers that this game is unlike any other. In a cybernetic landscape with thousands of worlds that are constantly evolving, trapped players are being pushed around from realm to realm according to the whims of the mysterious Game Master.
As she faces varying threats and acquires indispensable skills, Sarah soon realizes that this game can't be won playing by the rules. Her only chance to rescue her boyfriend and make it out of the game alive is to beat the Game Master at his own meta-game! But first, she'll have to make her way across the different realms by fighting zombies, goblins, bandits and beasts made with the fabric of fear!
Who is the Game Master? Why is he doing this? Is there still time to find a way to defeat him or is it already too late? Will Sarah be able to rescue Mike, or will they both end up trapped forever in the virtual nightmare?
My Opinion: 350 pages, $3.99, Not Available on Kindle Unlimited
This story is a bit of confusing mess. The prologue is confusing because it drops you into the end of the story without identifying who anyone is, or what’s happening. Just that they’re trapped in the game without their memories facing monsters when a new person falls from the sky. The reader is left wondering what the heck is happening and then the the story shifts. That experience is a good indicator of what the rest of the novel is like.
At its core this is a trapped in the game story. The main character (MC), Sarah, goes into an unfinished full immersion game to rescue her kidnapped boyfriend who for no ever explained reason has been kidnapped and stuck trapped in the game she was working on until her gropy boss made a pass at her. The whole setup here is very improbable and stretches the suspension of disbelief to near the breaking point. After, character creation, in which her appearance and her name are chosen for her. Then after she basically wonders around the game, doing a quest, getting a little bit more info about the game and maybe killing something. Then the entire game world changes and she finds herself in another game setting. Then the cycle repeats itself. While this lends itself to providing a variety of sci-fi and fantasy worlds for the MC to explore, she’s never in any one world long enough for it to really get fleshed out or for the reader to care much about the ever changing game mechanics on each world.
Which leads me to the game mechanics. There’s really no point discussing them, since each world has its own system. However, there’s no depth in any because the MC never stays long in any of the worlds. The only mechanic to stay through them all is the MCs character sheet which records her stats, level, skills, and abilities.
Overall, while I appreciate the variety of worlds and different games that get a nod in the story, because there’s no depth to either the mechanics or the world building, I was bored. I may have liked the MC as a character but I stopped caring about what she was doing because I knew where it was ending (the Prologue) and anything else felt a bit like filler to get her there.
Score: 5 out of 10
The World Jumper: A LitRPG Adventure (The Digidream Chronicles Book 1)