The company says Otherworld is amazing — like nothing you’ve ever seen before. They say it’s addictive — that you’ll want to stay forever. They promise Otherworld will make all your dreams come true.
Simon thought Otherworld was a game. Turns out he knew nothing. Otherworld is the next phase of reality. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted.
And it’s about to change humanity forever.
Welcome to the Otherworld. No one could have seen it coming.
I’m not exactly sure how this book started. At first, Simon had taken his parent’s credit card and bought himself a VR setup to play a game. His parents find out and destroy the headset. Then, there is a storyline about how he’s already gotten arrested for some sort of robot thing that his friend did, and THEN you find out about his friend Kat that he has a crush on. Finally, we get to the main storyline. Kat.is in an accident that leaves her with locked-in syndrome and Otherworld is a game she can play to escape her paralyzed body. Then Simon figures out that something isn’t right about Otherworld, and he spends the rest of the book in and out of the world, trying to find Kat.
I could not get into this book until around 200 pages in when the storyline about his adventures in Otherworld really started to pick up speed. I just didn’t understand what was going on? Was this going to be a book about his trouble with his family? What happened to the game that he was trying to play at the start of the novel? What happened to the friend that he had gone to jail for? And what the heck was going on with Kat that he stopped speaking to him all of the sudden. Nothing made sense, nothing at all. I felt as if I was reading multiple stories, and then they all came together into one and the book decided to have a plot.
I also thought that this was going to be a LitRPG novel, but it read more like the kids simply going on an adventure. They were constantly in danger and fighting the Children and other NPCs in the world, but there were little to no RPG elements. No leveling, no anything. And why did the other people in Otherworld go crazy? There was no explanation for this. If everyone just wanted to go crazy, why weren’t Simon and his friends affected? They couldn’t have possibly been the only ones with a brain in Otherworld.
One of the things that I did enjoy was the discussion of human vs. NPC. Everyone thought that the Children could be killed because they were just the offspring of the Otherworld NPCs, but to the Children, Otherworld was their home. They had some sort of history in their minds as a part of the programming, and they just wanted to live safely. In their heads, the Guests had come in and just started slaughtering them out of nowhere. It was quite a unique story element.
I also have to say that I didn’t hate the characters. Even though Simon acted a bit spoiled sometimes, he was determined to save Kat. Kat was able to survive on her own in Otherworld, but she needed him to help her in the real world where she couldn’t speak. I also grew to like the characters that he had met while in Otherworld.
At the time of writing this review, I have read Otherearth. It is definitely a lot better than this book. I would recommend this book if someone was still interested in the series as a whole because you have to read this book to understand what is going on in Otherearth. If you aren’t interested in the series as a whole, then I would not recommend starting to read this book.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Overall Rating: 2 out of 5 stars