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.