Rick is a gamerunner in a massive virtual reality RPG in a dystopian future world. His job is to look for bugs in the code, and he gets to play all day and live well in a protected bubble in the headquarters of the company who make the game. His father, Daed, is the game creator.

Things go sour one day when someone finds a hack into the roots of the maze and looks like he will successfully complete the RPG quest for the very first time. Rick is sent in to stop him, because under no circumstances must the game be finished.

This book was a fast moving adventure that built heavily on the dystopian genre and on computer gaming trends. The world has suffered climate catastrophes so that the air poisons you and the rain will kill you. The rich cocoon themselves away from a world that is disintegrating right outside of their little bubbles of safety.

The book had promise, but it was really a pretty miserable lead, and the story did not so much as finish as come to a crashing halt with pretty much everything unexplained and unresolved. As a story, this book fails. It felt like Murukami for young adults, and I am no fan of Murukami's habit of just abandoning his plot when he seems to get bored of writing!

So I tried to think if there was something deeper going on with the story. Why had I invested my time in reading a book that failed to resolve itself? What was it trying to tell me? I decided that the author was probably trying to make the story like a video game that also leaves you feeling like it is unresolved and demands you play it again. That may be why he chose to end the way he did - it was all a video game analogy.

That may be what he intended but it was not a video game, it was a story, so I did not much like the ending.

Is it a story that makes you think, though? Perhaps on that score it succeeds a little. You get a strong sense of "there must be more to life than this" from this book, although the book doesn't find anything more. In fact it all felt very nihilistic and depressing. A couple of faint touches of humour lift it slightly, but really this book must be aimed at angsty teenagers with a penchant for wearing black and playing violent video games.

I don't think I will be recommending it to anyone. ( )

Inhabitant of a future where acid rain makes it hazardous to go outside, Rick spends his time in the 'tank' running the Maze, an immersive computer game. Then Daed, who is possibly Rick's father, gives him a mission and things start to go terribly wrong.
This book keeps you guessing right to the end - you share in Nick's confusion as to what is happening and why. At the end some questions are resolved but not all. This book is suitable for teen readers, especially but not solely, those are keen on gaming. ( )