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Gamerunner
by B.R. Collins

Release Date: 4th Jul 2011
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978 1 4088 0648 7
RRP: £6.99

Average Customer Rating: 
(0.0 based on 0 ratings)

A novel about a virtual reality game with existentialist aspirations - it's been done better...

Game Runner is an oppressive tale of a future where the world is an inhospitable, deadly place. Those with the means take refuge in “The Maze”; a virtual reality game that exerts so much power and influence over the populace, that your gaming status is valued over real life.

Daed is a Creative; the key individual behind Crater’s top commodity: “The Maze”. The more normally named Rick is a teenage boy whose precise relationship to Daed seems to be in perpetual flux. Rick is an exceptional gamer; his life being consumed by The Maze. Crater is the sky-scraping, all powerful corporation that runs The Maze. For Daed and Rick, Crater is personified by a woman named Paz: a pathological individual, fiscally driven to the point of psychosis. Failure is not an option and that means no one can be allowed to win the game. But when Rick inadvertently reaches the endgame of The Maze – a supposed impossibility - Crater is not impressed, which is to say: Paz is not impressed. Unpleasant incidents in his real life begin to gnaw away at Rick’s luxuriant bubble signalling the end of his ignorance and forcing him to confront the chilling truth about the real world he physically exists in: an apartheid existence, where those who are employed by Crater or the government have relative safety, food and shelter; whilst the majority are left to survive as best they can in a barren environment with the constant threat of death either by gangs, desperados or the regular downpours of lethal acid rain.

Whilst there is a degree of rawness to the exposition that even a gilded cage is still a prison; the under developed characters and their distinctly awkward interactions with each other makes the dialogue feel contrived and forced. Conceptually, Game Runner offers little original fodder to the virtual reality theme and in the end suffers with a lack of direction. What began as a promising new take on a futuristic world; exhausts itself with its teenage angst, corporate rancour and unfathomable characters. We have to say at this point that we’ve only seen an uncorrected proof: here’s hoping the final cut manages to eke out something more eloquent.

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