I was interested to see what Morse would do with the story after he thoroughly wrapped up the main plot of the previous story. If he just had the main character jump into a new character not his own to learn about it would come seem forced and repetitive, but playing the game normally is also a divergence from the style of this book. So what does he do? Kind of both. He does get to make his standard character and play as him, but also, about half way through, he's drawn in to playing an NPC Demon a player summoned. This works pretty well at transitioning from the previous books style into a more sustainable story format.
Of course, like the last book, the actual game aspects of this book are mostly scenery to the character drama. Morse does a great job of showing how everything going on is re-breaking and mending the main character
There are a lot of questions about the world and AI in general presented here as well. And that ending...