This book is mostly a lot.

There's some cool stuff here, but I'm not sure it really lands for me. While the video game is essential to the plot, it doesn't necessarily mesh well with the theme. Between shouting spells of power morphemes, getting inducted into a cabal and also learning to fight it with the anarchists but also maybe working with them, existential threats warping themselves into fear, and alien punctuation marks in your brain...it could maybe have been tighter. The way pronouns are called out in descriptions feels like it misses the point in a way that is somewhat emblematic of the book as a whole.

This book really disappointed me. None of the characters felt like real people and they were impossible to tell apart, the game did not feel like a real game (and making the game VR felt pointless), every single plan was stupid, there was no character growth, and the magic system was both barely related to linguistics (it's basically dragon shouting like in Skyrim) and impossible to understand (it just did whatever the plot needed it to do). Like outside of the purpose in which they use it in the story Headphone Splitter is a completely pointless spell that can be better accomplished by existing technology. A bunch of stuff (especially around the Scientology plotline and the nature of the punctuation marks) is brought up but never resolved.

Every character is introduced with this weird title card featuring their name, race and (presumed) pronouns but this both feels clunky and borderline offensive on occasion and highlights how almost all of the characters are cisgender white people so I'm not sure what the point was. Half the plot is descriptions of things that happened that are just glossed over.

This book feels like it really wants to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it isn't.

Too focused on visuals and audio details, I prefer a conversation-heavy style.