Jeff Hayes is always great as narrator, but he can’t prop up this book.
The protagonist is an insufferable moron without any personality, and the premise of the VR world is inconsistent. He’s also kind of a douchebag to everyone without any apparent awareness of this from the author.
The whole underlying motivation of the character early on can be boiled down to “I acted like a piece of garbage, and bigger pieces of garbage got fed up with that and turned on me so now I want revenge.”
How are you supposed to root for someone like that? If the antagonists weren’t such unrepentant a-holes about the whole thing to an absolutely comical degree, the protagonist would look like the bad guy.
He’s a rich nepo-baby that lucked into everything and used that to sit around leeching off others.