I read this on a recommendation from my sister who does not read anything I’d normally hand her, so I went in generous. Wade Watts lives in a stacked trailer park in a collapsing near future and spends his life inside the OASIS, a virtual world built by a dead billionaire nerd who’s hidden an inheritance-sized easter egg inside it, three keys, three gates, whoever finds it all first inherits the company. Cline clearly loves every reference he’s dropping, and there’s a real charm to how much fun he’s having, but somewhere around the Zork sequence I noticed I could name almost every 80s touchstone in here and it still wasn’t adding up to much beyond itself.

The name-dropping is the whole engine and also the problem, there’s rarely a reason a specific reference matters beyond “I know this one too,” which is a strange kind of empty for a book so obsessed with people who supposedly live for this stuff. And Wade never really loses. He gets an extra life exactly when he needs one, he’s never actually broke or actually starving even though the book keeps telling us the world is, the corporate villain gets dispatched without so much as a real confrontation. For a story built entirely around a competition, there’s shockingly little jeopardy in it.

What I did like, genuinely, is the world-mechanics of it, how school works inside a VR headset, how an economy runs on quarters as a stand in for lives, the sense of an entire generation opting into a shared simulation because the outside world got too grim to look at directly. That part still holds up a decade past whenever I first heard of this book, especially now that we’ve all had a few years of actually living half our social lives through a screen. I just wish the people inside that world had felt like they were risking anything to be there.

Three stars from me, borderline generous. Fun enough for an airport, forgettable by the time you land.