Synopsis
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.
The Good
- The whole premise is a really good idea
- The characters stupidity is kind of entertaining- I would involuntarily laugh at their poor decisions all the time
- The story was fun to react to – I used up all of my orange post it notes commenting on the characters foolishness
- The chapters are incredibly short which made it a kind of quick read, flow quicker: things are constantly happening, the chapters shift point of view through the characters a lot
- Really good at portraying certain type of guys (white male rage dudes)
The Bad
- Diversity= they are basically white people painted black/brown
-a white man obviously wrote this it comes off very on brand for how white dudes (especially scifi) write people of color
- Characterization: it feels like the characters are all buzzwords and stereotype one dimensional shells
- The book feels all over the place, it felt like a bunch of stuff just happening instead of introducing characters and their history over time in the right place. It feels like you are bombarded with information.
- The characters voices kind of blend together. On a few occasions mistaking characters for each other was an occurrence.
Overall
I enjoyed this book and having finished it I think more of the good than the bad. Or the bad somehow turned into the good because it was part of the entertainment/reaction factor of me reading the story.
I won The God Game in a email contest from St. Martin’s Press
(image and synopsis are from goodreads)
themollyweather 