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Yahtzee is one of my favorite game critics, not just because his Zero Punctuation series is hilarious but because he's generally spot on with his criticisms, especially where storytelling is concerned, because he understands when it works and when it doesn't. Unfortunately, not all of his own advice makes it into his first published novel, and the results are a bit disappointing. This is by no means a bad book - it's frequently funny and full of clever and original ideas - but it doesn't come close to matching the humor density of one of his short video reviews, and when the humor's not there, the rest of the book is pretty thin. Just about all of the characters except for Jim the protagonist are one-or-two-note caricatures, and seem to exist largely to give Jim someone at which to be annoyed. The plot is choppy and episodic, whisking Jim from encounter to encounter (usually via the device of making him temporarily dead or at least unconscious, which gets repetitive) without a clear rhythm or sense of progression. This makes the climax feel a bit abrupt. The denouement is clever enough to make up for that, but on the whole I expected this book to be less of an effort to get through.

Right now Yahtzee reads like someone doing a pretty good job of imitating Douglas Adams. I'm confident he can grow into a writer with his own voice to rival Adams' if he can turn his keen criticism skills on himself.