‘The Broken World’ – Tim Etchells (William Heinemann)

This is a weird one to write about. A book with a great premise that is executed well, a book that I think deserves to do really well in fact but a book that I just couldn’t finish. I’ll try and explain…

‘The Broken World’ is the story of one man’s attempts to write a ‘walk through guide’ to a complex computer game. When I say ‘complex’ that’s exactly what I mean for this is a game that can take months to play and can be completed in any number of ways. Writing a ‘walk through’ would be hard enough on it’s own but our narrator is also having to cope with the demands of a full time job and a full time relationship (both of which are being neglected). Something’s got to give and our hero is going to have to ‘win’ in the game and the real world too…

I’m always after trying new stuff and ‘The Broken World’ looked like a good one. In a lot of ways it was. As a tale of obsession it was great and the journey away from reality (into ‘The Broken World’) went at just the right speed whilst being strangely poignant. I was really getting into the narrator’s character as well, a guy with a clear sense of self in that you can really tell where his priorities lay.

All sounds good so far, so where was the problem? I didn’t have a problem with the book but I did have a problem with what the book was about, i.e. a ‘free roaming’ computer game. I love playing video games but I always end up losing patience with the ones where you can pretty much do whatever you like. This stems from early experiences with PC flight simulators (where I kept crashing just to see what would happen) as well as the time when I found the cheat for infinite lives, on ‘The Phantom Menace’, and promptly went off and butchered the inhabitants of Mos Espa (just to see what would happen, I was called a murderer by Anakin Skywalker and this was the last thing he ever said to anyone…)

You can now see that I’m not very good with certain types of computer game and this made ‘The Broken Man’ really difficult for me to get into as far as the ‘game world’ parts went. Playing the game can be infuriating enough without having to read about how to complete it, especially when all you want to do is try out weird stuff… just to see what would happen.

As good as ‘The Broken World’ was looking to be, it turned out to be a read that I just couldn’t stick with. Game over for me and onto the next book…