way way way too long. and then it just stops half way through with nothing resolved. There are hints of quite a good story among the rest of it, but it needs serious editing to remove the unnecessary wordage and scenes and to keep the pacing faster and flowing.

The basic premise it not novel, but works quite well - a company has developed the first fully VR 'immersive' headset, and so released a fantasy game for people to experience 'in real life'. Shortly after starting playing the 'logout' button is removed and the characters are trapped within the game. The vast majority of the rest of the book, is repetitive details of the characters grinding levels and gaining spells and items. This si quite representative of playing such games, but utterly boring to read about, especially when for instance the narrator describes all the different geographical areas, or prolonged bouts of swordplay etc. Being a fantasy game all the characters can suffer ridiculous injuries and providing they aren't 'killed' make a full recovery very quickly. As might be expected factions form and politics happen, all very WoW like, but again, only of interest if you have a stake in it, which the reader doesn't, the central narrator deliberately avoids. The basic concept seems to be to defeat a number of the games 'boss' enemies and conquer a castle. But we don't get the games stoyline, just our narrators descriptions, and he skips any if the storytelling - again true to life, but not good reading.

Around all this tedium are flashbacks to almost equally fantastic story of friends on a camping trip that goes wrong, but the details are very very spare especially considering this is the 'real' world that the game s set in. There is no explanation for these fantastic events, nor the premise behind the game, or indeed much of anything.

It's a well imagined world, full of the sorts of details that authors need in order to write internally consistent stories, especially those in fantasy settings, but like good plumbing, the reader doesn't need to see it. The characters are mostly a bit whiney but enjoy playing with the game elements.

There are pictures of various scenes and chapter headings, none of which work in an ebook format although at least they don't corrupt the formatting.

Don't recommend, but with decent editing there's a good kernel there. ( )