On Pandora’s seventeenth birthday, she gets an email from her estranged father. And she opens it. Next thing she knows, the government’s beating down her door for uploading a worm/virus to the internet that destroys all technology. Her only option now is to follow her father’s instructions: “Beat the game. Save the world.”

This is another one of those books that I read in the past and remembered liking. Unfortunately, this one fell into the category of ‘not as good as I remember.’ I love the base concept of it—having to go on a real-life road trip scavenger hunt to find the information needed to beat the video game and save the world. But the whole ‘disaster’ of it all wasn’t really doing it for me. There was a lot of technological information that was kind of unnecessary and didn’t really make sense. I’m no technology expert though. It could be accurate. I also felt like for all the extra tech information we were given, we were missing out on important storyline information. Not necessarily fact checking (forget the accuracy of the story), but follow through… and consistency? For example: when Pandora finds the pomegranates and decides it’s a password for the game, she mentions Eli finding an “AR gate” that needed a password in the past—that never happened. If it did, the reader was never told about it. So we spent 100 pages reading about this road trip, and we didn’t even know why we were on it. And that’s just one example. I have more.

I also felt like the parts of the story where Pandora, Theo, and Eli were playing the game got kind of confusing. It was sometimes written as if the characters were experiencing these things instead of their avatars. For example: feeling pain, running out of breath, closing one’s eyes and expecting to be hit, and many more.

That being said, I didn’t not enjoy my time reading—at least not all of the time. Once we got past the first challenge, I got caught up in the scavenger hunt and the game. And I loved the drama between Eli and Theo. Was I slightly frustrated that Pandora couldn’t take a hint that part of their hatred for each other was that they were both fighting for her? Yeah. A little bit. But it also kind of made sense that she wasn’t putting much thought into it because she was on a time crunch to save the world.

All in all, it had potential to be better than it was.