The main problem I had with this book was the wholly unlikeable main character. No, not “you,” but Russell. He’s condescending (to the reader, to the people with whom he works), vapid, and I found his own personal journey, which never really goes anywhere all that interesting, boring.

In fact, perhaps two-thirds of the slog through this book you get a confession from one of the other characters that they never trusted Russell in the first place, and still don’t trust him, now that he’s flown back into their world of game design geekery, that he won’t finish the job of designing this latest game and then fly off to the cool kids again.

The narrative switches perspective a few times — it’s mostly written in the first person, but occasionally will go deep into another character’s thoughts and motivations, a sort of first person omniscient, but since the narrator has held himself at arm’s length from the other characters it’s an unrealistic expectation that the reader would buy he’s able to speak for his fellow characters. Plus, as I’ve said, I just didn’t like the character, so it was tough to swallow an entire, galumphing journey through an imaginary games company’s back catalog told from his perspective.

The journey through the back catalog and into the actual games is wildly boring, as well, the language enraptured by being immersed in a whole other world, the sights, the smells, the emotions of the characters! But, wait, the smells? The feelings of the characters? I get where the author is trying to go with this treatment of video games… but it’s way over the top and the game stories don’t seem particularly compelling and he goes into far too much detail about the backstory that just kills the things flat for me. We’re supposed to be fascinated by how rich and full these games are even if it’s just ampersands and characters running around a maze of periods!!!!!! But you’ve either played these games and know how you can get sucked in or you haven’t and the painfully dry and long-winded explanations are just not going to convince you otherwise.

I kept plugging on to see if the story got any better, or maybe I was hoping to see the narrator get killed as the Alewife T station collapsed, spewing concrete rubble everywhere, but here’s the spoiler: it really didn’t.