Book Review
Written by Tim Etchells
Windmill Books paperback
Release date Out now

An online walkthrough blog cheerfully cripples a nerd’s ability to be anything approaching functional in real life…

Written in a broken English peppered with internet speak and gaming reference, The Broken World by Tim Etchells is a charming bit of contemporary fiction that pulls back the curtain on the curious and mundane world of online culture.

Etchell’s narrator launches into a fast-paced walkthrough blog of a fictitious online game called The Broken World, complete with bloodthirsty zombies to slaughter, opaque puzzles to solve and – naturally – a beautiful woman to save.

The narrator’s online project is periodically (and apologetically) interrupted with anecdotes, complaints and near-philosophical observations from his ‘real life’, mostly relating to the crumbling relationship with his live-in girlfriend Tory, the internal politics of his go-nowhere job at the pizza joint and the deteriorating mental health of his close friend and gaming companion, Brainiac.

Etchell’s narrator is sweet, eager, obsessed and totally likeable, which makes it all the more unbearable to witness the foreseeable mess he is making of his ‘real life’ at the expense of his blog, which – entertaining as it may be to read – tragically doesn’t even seem fit for purpose.

The Broken World is engaging and enjoyable. The characters are thoroughly developed using some pretty slick, sideways narrative devices. The fast-paced blockbuster plotline of the in-game universe is balanced by the slow and sincere plodding facts of the narrator’s own ever-so-slightly depressing everyday. If you’re after hardcore science fiction, this isn’t it. What it is, however, is an elegant and worthwhile bridging of the worlds of literary fiction and gaming culture, executed with sensitivity and skill. Worth a read. Nadine Monem

VERDICT: 7 /10
Etchell’s charming depiction of online gaming culture is no loser, though his characters clearly are.