Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, Vol. 2

Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table Light Novel #2

by Yushi Ukai, Nekometaru (artist)

Three months after the events of Candle Woods, Yuki plunges back into the world of death games. This time, she’s participating in Scrap Building, a race to escape an unstable, abandoned structure. But to make it out with her life, she must contend with Mishiro, a haughty, pretentious player intent on getting in her way. Time goes by, and Yuki finds herself in a game called Golden Bath, staring down the Wall of Thirty—a curse in the industry where misfortune befalls players around their thirtieth game. Whether the effects of the curse are real, or her awareness of the phenomenon is tripping her up, one thing is for certain—Yuki is in bad shape as she contends with her toughest game yet.

Genres: Light Novel

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 2023

Reviews

[Zevitjoss · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this volume the main character, Yuki faces her thirtieth death game and the "Wall of Thirty". A sort of superstition among death game players in this book where a player's thirtieth game tends to be their most dangerous game which they refer to as "Wall of Thirty". A wall that separates the truly skilled players from the average ones. It was quite underwhelming.

While this is not a character driven story by any means, with the amount of build up the Wall of Thirty had I would have assumed that Yuki would be forced to grow as a person or learn something new so that she could clear this huge hurdle. It's supposed to be a huge milestone in her career and while she did struggle a bit more than usual it still didn't feel like anything special. The game itself wasn't particularly interesting either especially when compared to first one.

The first death game in this volume was pretty fun. The story of this series is told in vignettes with every chapter so far being their own standalone death game with the only thing linking them together being Yuki so you really never know who's gonna die though you can't really connect with the characters that isn't too much of an issue for this series.

I love how it feels like every death is something that can be avoided if a player was simply a bit smarter. The usage of fractions to signify chapter divisions is something I'm really fond of. It, the excellent pacing and how almost every subchapter ends with a tiny cliffhanger just caused me to constantly have a hard time putting the book down. It kept making me think "just one more part".