Daria Jackson hasn’t entered NeuroNet to play Challenge of Vircon since her tanking husband passed away. A newly single mom, she quit VR esports to develop biofarming hardware for deep space exploration.
For ten years Daria’s cheered her kids on as they fought their way up CoV leaderboards. While cleaning their VR cabinets, a forgotten login protocol drops her at level one in the game world she almost ruled. Strange glitches and odd throwbacks from her past hint at a ghost in the machine related to her family.
Daria’s weekend project is supposed to be writing a speech to present her Perpetual Biofarming Unit at Earthsplorer Command. But now she’s caught up in CoV, leveling up to unearth a mystery. Can Daria choose between the game and her real-world responsibilities?
My Opinion: 169 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
First, the unbelievable premise of a mom who was a former esports star, now ready to retire biologist with a Phd at age 37, who just happens to get trapped in a VR game while cleaning her kid’s gaming pods.
In addition to that, the story is kind of boring and devolves to a grind to read while reading about a level grind. The story is basically about this trapped mom who is forced to play a set of challenges with two randomly chosen players. It ends up being: Kill mobs and boss, get loot, repeat. There are some minor sub plots with her trying to flirt with another player and a minor thread about who forced her to stay logged in. However, mostly a level grind story. Unfortunately, even as they level, the player’s powers don’t change and at most they get new powers from their gear so the levels don’t even mean much.
The action scenes are decently described and there’s a punny sense of humor. But it’s a series of fights and not much else. It gets pretty boring, pretty quickly.
Score: 5 out of 10