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At the core of this book is an action-adventure story with some charm and packed with nostalgia. There are fun descriptions of game-play elements and a scavenger hunt with high stakes and complex clues. If there is anything to recommend this story, it's that core of action and adventure. I think that those who love this book must lock on to this portion and hold on tight. Unfortunately for me, I just couldn't look beyond the sloppy surrounding bits of Cline's story, especially has they had to do with some problematic messaging and lazy character building.

This is one giant wish fulfillment story. The geeky boy is the start and he works from the beginning of the story to the ultimate end game of large, in charge and with the girl. We can start the listing of problems with the fact that he starts fat and ends skinny because of course.

The love interest is one of 2 (ish) named female characters and both of those serve the function of love interest. Cline hits a lot of the low points of cheap ways to use women in your story, including if she's not a love interest, she's a lesbian, a woman came between us and now we are enemies, and you are good girl, but not as good as me a man.

While some people really enjoyed the cultural references, I found it hit or miss. At some points I thought it was cool and added to the story. At others, it felt pointless to simply LIST THINGS, basically to prove that our MC (and by extension Cline) knew them. Amazingly, I felt like if Cline somehow made these references condescending. There was certainly a gate-keepery vibe going, for me at least. Also, it didn't work for me at the very beginning of the story, where the exposition was so heavy, the story couldn't take off until about the 75 page mark.

While I enjoyed the scavenger hunt in general, I thought in the end it was kind of a JUST BECAUSE thing. There really was no reason why it existed, why it was created other than JUST BECAUSE. That left me super disappointed.

In general, this book disappointed me, and that's not even touching on the spoilery bits that were probably the worst of all.