Rarely do video games and any other medium meet, and when they do it’s usually a massive disaster – think the Super Mario Bros movie or the video game adaptations of every blockbuster released in the last ten years. From cash ins to published fanfiction, it’s a sorry state of affairs. So, when I discovered a novel about video games that wasn’t utterly repugnant and lacking in soul, I thought it might be worth a gander.

The Broken World is portrayed as a walkthrough of a game of the same name, written by an unnamed narrator who cannot help but let his personal life interrupt his Internet duties. At first dedicated and detailed in his descriptions of possibly the hardest video game to ever not exist, everything around him and his sad little life begins to collapse, and he shares all with his rather unfortunate fellow gamers.

I am in two minds about this novel. On the one hand, it’s a very intriguing idea with the possibility for subtle parallels, metaphorical mischief and merging science fiction with the real world. On the other hand, its execution fell so far short of its potential it is hard to not feel let down. The main character, our narrator, is so inherently unlikeable that empathy is definitely off the table. He is lazy, inconsiderate, stuck in a dead end drone worker job with no intent of going anywhere, and addicted to a video game.

Hold on. I write a blog about video games. I have been known for 12 hour Skyrim benders and Achievement chasing until I can’t feel my thumbs. But this guy is a whole new level and I really don’t know how that makes me feel. He skips work for days on end to play, he doesn’t eat, barely sleeps and doesn’t even care that his girlfriend has walked out on him and his best friend has gone missing. Instead he buries himself in the game world in a very saddening case of denial, but he loses sympathy points for also being the worst walkthrough writer in the world. The inclusion of his real life musings with his instructions are so clunky and forced that the reader is made constantly aware of the author, trying to tip toe behind the scenes and make things flow nicely, but instead tripping over a bucket and blundering around with it stuck on his foot.

It is hard to gauge whether the protagonist’s life falling apart is linked to his addiction to the game, however – because at the book’s conclusion everything fixes itself without him even lifting a finger from the mouse. So he’s useless and didn’t even learn anything from it. He didn’t grow, he didn’t change, and he certainly didn’t become any more endearing. He didn’t take any steps to fix his life, it just fixed itself for him while he sat on his ass all day. If anything by the end of the book I wanted to pick up his computer keyboard and bash him in the face with it

So character development gets a big thumbs down.

The other half of the book is the walkthrough itself, which makes for interesting if painful reading. Described in the blurb as a game of “Borgesian complexity”, The Broken World sounds like hell on an H drive. It is a wonderfully interesting concept to read about, with a huge game world spanning unmappable reaches, puzzles which require you to have items from over 20 hours ago still in your inventory (in league with the Hitchhiker’s Guide, no doubt) and swathes of enemies and characters to interact with. Communicating the scale of the game is nearly impossible, but I am constantly jarred by its lack of playability. As a games student flags were going up the entire time – mostly along the lines of “Well, no processor on Earth could handle that many variables, how is this moron running it on a computer with a 20GB hard drive?”.

Envisioning a game without the limitations of hardware, software and numerous other creative resources makes for an entertaining read, if not an entirely practical one. Complaining that a fictitious game couldn’t actually exist (yet) seems a tad redundant, I know, but for a gamer ingrained with inescapable truths about the industry it is impossible to totally detach oneself and just enjoy the show. Ironically, the only people who would really bear interest in the novels concept would have to be gamers to begin with. In a way, the novel is selling itself to an audience who have the authority and knowledge to simply reject it out of hand.

In short, it’s a novel about a game which is unplayable and a character who is unlikeable. They deserve each other. Right now I deserve some aspirin and a real game that’s worth my time.