Indie April Highlight: “Awaken Online: Cartharsis” by Travis Bagwell

The “Indie Highlight” is a series of posts in which I shine the lights on Indie/Self-Published books that I believe are worthy of your attention. I’ll be writing reviews and recommending them, along with providing links on where to get the books.

Awaken Online: Catharsis by Travis Bagwell

It’s been one heck of a couple months with COVID-19 going around. I decided to finally cave and try out a sub-genre I’ve been thinking about for a while: LitRPG. Simply put, a LitRPG books are written as though they’re taking place in an RPG, complete with leveling up and stats in the text. I know pretty little about the genre, so I can’t comment on how broadly that definition works but that’s how I’ve seen people talk about it. The book I went with was one that advertised hard for me on Facebook to the point I finally snagged a copy of it: Awaken Online: Catharsis. 

The book follows Jason, a young man who’s had a lot of things go wrong recently–getting in fights, a girl he likes apparently siding with a bully against him, school troubles, etc. He decides to play “Awaken Online,” a virtual reality MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) to blow off some steam, and discovers an experience that seems tailored to his own life in some ways. There are other things going on in the plot, much more than I expected, to be honest.

The book is basically broken into two phases taking place simultaneously: Jason’s real life, and his in-game life and development. I was honestly surprised by how quickly I got sucked into the MMORPG life of Jason’s VR avatar. It wasn’t complex, but it was a lot of fun. The wa he leveled up and thought through how to gain what he desired was interesting, and made for a page-turning read. I loved the magic and other aspects of gameplay, and found myself thinking of it as a real video game I’d want to play. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there are some shenanigans with the company that made the addictive Awaken Online and an AI they created to make it fun to play. 

The real-life portion of the book almost seemed a distraction at times as I wanted to see what was going on with Jason in Awaken Online. But it was important to the story’s flow, and I think it does credit to Travis Bagwell’s writing that I got sucked in so well to the game world. Jason’s real life, as I said, is pretty tough, and his parents aren’t great either. That said, the characters outside the game world have very little interaction or development. I’d say at this point in the series, the meat of the book is the gameworld, though it’s clear more ‘real life’ things could transpire as well. 

I was extremely pleasantly surprised by Awaken Online: Catharsis. It served as my first foray into LitRPG as a sub-genre, and I expect to spend a lot of time here. Check it out, and let me know what you think, too!

Links

Indie Highlight– Read about more indie titles by looking at all my posts about indie sci-fi/fantasy (mostly)! Scroll down for more. Let me know what you think, and tell me your recommendations!

J.W. Wartick- Always Have a Reason– Check out my “main site” which talks about philosophy of religion, theology, and Christian apologetics (among other random topics). I love science fiction so that comes up integrated with theology fairly frequently as well. I’d love to have you follow there, too!

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SDG.