The Warped Forest

Gamemakers Online Series, Book 1

By: Thomas K. Carpenter

Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg

Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Could you defeat the world's hardest immersive game?

Alexandria Duke must learn how to or risk losing everything.

When Alex joins Gamemakers Online, she finds there are no newbie areas, no tutorials, and nothing but vicious critters hunting her down. This seems like an impossible task, but Alex is a veteran platinum achievement hunter who has solved previously unwinnable scenarios. She won't give up now. As she delves deeper into the game, she discovers it hides sinister secrets. If she can't survive the first year in Gamemakers Online, then she'll lose more than her own life.

©2019 Thomas K. Carpenter (P)2019 Tantor

Once you start this book you will be hooked

Exciting, interesting, and different. The main character also learns a very important lesson about life and love.

Yes. More

What a fascinating take on magic and history, after hearing this book I bought the rest on my kindle and binge read every one of the gamemakers online series. Please make more! I'm going to buy the rest of the hundred halls series now too just promise to make more of these

Good idea, but kinda glaring ‘huh?’ moments

Cool idea. It even started out really good! But I think I wasn’t sucked in as much because she was levelling completely in isolation without a party or friends in real life or even a driving quest goal. The whole point of the book was ‘level or else’, which didn’t make me root for her as much as I do for someone who has a legit goal. Overall it was still interesting to see her contraptions and plans she made. The point of ‘wtf’ for me was actually towards the end of the year.

SPOILERS AHEAD
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So my big issue starts when she gets stung to death and goes home. The whole “let’s transfer this cancer out of my mom’s head and into mine” thing doesn’t actually follow the mechanics of the world. One, she has always transferred traits of things, not physical objects. Two, whenever she transferred things between ‘living’ objects in the game, the thing that had something transferred from it dissolved into pixels, but her mother is completely fine after this transfer. And the biology of adding a grape-sized lump of tumorous flesh into a young girl’s head doesn’t maybe... squish her brain to death a tad? That’s stretching biology, physics, AND magic to the breaking point.
Secondly, when she enters the game and runs all those mobs off the cliff - I mean, c’mon, really? Really?! Aside from not being very sporting, which is annoying but beside the point, there’s no way cloud taunt is SO powerful that all these mobs just run off a cliff and none of them get to her even a little bit. It just *screams* that the literary god of this world (aka author) is gonna just wave their typewriter and make this right for the MC, which frustrates me to no end.

The first half was great, but...

I really enjoyed most of the book even if magic In the real world was never explained, which was frustrating. Alex's perspective was interesting and caring and a nice change from most litrpgs I've read. the author is really good as a wordsmith and the story flows well but the levelling was too grindy, levelling as a grind is one of tne of the worst parts of mmorpgs and having to read that is just as unsatisfying.

I like the relationship she had with the animals and a lot of thought was put into the raven. but there was a sense that all the animal hybrids were somewhat intelligent and thinking creatures at least on par with their real counterparts But then in the last grind of leveling to 16, all the animals got really stupid and just followed one after the other to their deaths. it was just such a departure from the story and reason that I lost faith in the author's storytelling and though I finished the book I stopped believing.

this could have been a great book and started off strong but towards the end my suspension of disbelief was shattered.

Good for book for anyone!

I just listened to a book without profanity or sex that was absorbing, touching and thought provoking. I just wish it was longer or that the rest of the series was already available. If you like LITRPG this is a must read. I pay for my own books and my opinions are my own good or bad. Its up to you to decide.

Another great title by this Author.

I continue to greatly enjoy the works of T K Carpenter. Gripping from the word go. I only caution not to try to listen at work. I found myself standing at a wall for five minutes staring into the void listening to the tale.

Grinding in bookform

I love MMORPGs, and this sounded right up my alley! Unfortunatly, after the first couple chapters, I realized there wasn't really a plot other than lvling, and I could never stand grinding. Turns out, it also affect books.
The storyline about her mom toward the end was interesting and heartbreaking, but not enough for me to care about the rest of the series.