Maze Cheat

Gamerunner #2

by B.R. Collins

Ario is a Cheat: somebody who designs and sells Cheat Codes to Gamerunners. Rick and Pir are Gamerunners: people who try to win their fortune by playing The Maze, the interactive computer game that is so much more than an ordinary computer game. MazeCheat is set in a futuristic city scape where acid rain permanently falls. But despite the dreary surroundings there is a something that enables everybody to escape their everyday life. And that is The Maze, the interactive computer game where you don’t just play the game onscreen,you physically enter the world. Once in, you play – run, fight, avoid traps, choose your weapons – as if you are actually there. The hold of the game on everybody’s minds means that the company behind it, CRATER, is all-powerful.

But CRATER have a game expansion that is sinister to the extreme. In their new game, if you finally manage to beat it, it takes your brain and in particular your memories, to use as material for new games, for new Gamerunners, leaving you an empty shell. Except no one knows that yet. And when something terrible happens to Pir in The Maze, Ario and Rick need to try to destroy this terrible expansion of the game that kills. But the all-seeing CRATER is also onto them and time is running out…

Genres: Science Fiction, Young Adult

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2012

About the author

B.R. Collins is a graduate of both university and drama school. Her first novel The Traitor Game was published to much acclaim and was both winner of the Branford Boase Award 2009 and longlisted for the 2009 Carnegie Medal. Bridget lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

A Trick of the Dark, published by Bloomsbury in September 2009 and in paperback in September 2010, is her extraordinary, electric and tautly thrilling second novel.

Tyme's End, published by Bloomsbury in January 2011, is a psychological thriller that will have readers on the edge of their seats.

Gamerunner, published by Bloomsbury in July 2011, is a stunning departure into a future world of computer gaming.

The Broken Road, published by Bloomsbury in February 2012, is a powerful new novel based around the Children’s Crusades.

Read B R Collins's blog here

Watch the book trailer for Gamerunner

Reviews

[Rusty's Ghost Engine (also known as.......... Jinky Spring)]

First of all this was how I reacted to this shit...

So to anyone thinking to buy this book STOP AT ONCE you don't know what you're doing! If you have even the slightest clue as to what's good for you then keep far away from this book and all of Bloody. Rubbish. Collins' sorry excuses for books. Seriously that's all you need to know!

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
didn't live up to the blurb expectations
...beyond the final 'battle' within the Maze, i was expecting some kind of corporate showdown with Crater Inc that the blurb indicated and a return to the setting of the first book as part of the conclusion - the end, ario & rick going off into the acid rain?, felt abrupt and after the slow build to not really much of a conclusion, no holding of the corporation to account or the end of the Maze so disappointed but still slightly better than previous book

[Mely]

YA sf set in a future or alternate England where the only way out of acid-rain-drenched poverty is to win a virtual reality game. Gamerunners frequently hire mazecheats to program them cheatcodes. The first book, Gamerunner, focused on Ric, the pampered son of the chief game developer, Daed. (Ric = Icarus, Daed = Daedalus, the game (the Maze) = the Labyrinth. That no one recognizes their Greek antecedents and that they are apparently polytheists is what inclines me to think this is alternate rather than future.) The first book was the weakest of Collins' books, basically because Ric is a self-centered privileged idiot who takes far too long to realize that his privilege doesn't extend to other people. By the second corpse, I could not stop thinking, "Kid, how many of your friends are you going to get killed before you wise up?" Spoiler: More than two.

Mazecheat shifts the focus to Ario (= Ariadne), the eponymous cheat, whose career got trashed two weeks ago as collateral damage to Ric's shenanigans (she's never met him) and who is desperate to regain her cred before boss/big brother figure Dion (= Dionysus) kicks her out of the Workshop into the streets. A successful gamerunner invites her to make the score of a lifetime in defeating the latest game mods and naturally everything goes wrong. This is infinitely superior to its prequel just on the grounds that Ario is not an idiot, but it's still one of Collins' less interesting novels. Since I figure some of you would like to know: Ario is black and bisexual.

[Kell Cowley · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with Game Runner, I liked the concept and world of this story a lot more than the narrative style. The characters constantly talk in half-finished sentences and think in half-finished thoughts and it gets very irritating after a while. But the characters and the structure of their world is very well-realized and that kept me reading.

[Samantha (A Dream of Books) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having not read the first book in this series I found it quite difficult to pick up the threads of the story and understand the whole concept of Maze Cheat. I did manage to finish this one but struggled with it from the beginning.