Game Novels Are a Revelation

I normally do not read novels based on video games. You can take my favourite gaming franchises, novelize them and I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole. I guess I've given them a stigma of being poorly written, juvenile and just plain bad literature.

So my attitude is all the more surprising because I recently finished reading the first novel based on Mass EFfect, simply titled Revelation. Let me correct myself: I finished reading the book and I damn well enjoyed myself while doing it. While it did not shatter any of my long held prejudices against game novels, I still found a way to appreciate the art form and gain a better understanding of the game intellectual property as a whole.

The author, Drew Karpyshyn, is the lead writer for the BioWare RPG, Mass Effect which was released last November. As a games writer, Mr. Karpyshyn is great. He's been able to craft a convincing, fully developed sci-fi universe. Not an easy task in 2008, when you have 30-year old franchises like Star Wars still ruling the pop culture zeitgeist. As a novelist, Mr. Karpyshyn could work on his writing chops a little more but to his credit he still gets the job done by writing a fast-paced and exciting prequel to the video game.

Yes, Revelation takes place a few decades before the events of the video game and as such provides a massive amount of background information on many different points of interest touched upon in the game. We are taken to the early years when humanity first discovered the Prothean technology on Mars, the bold exploration of their first mass effect relay and an in-depth examination of many of the alien races. The author puts in the passenger seat next to Lieutenant Anderson, who fans of the game will immediately identify with as your player-character's mentor, Captain Anderson. Anderson isn't the grizzled and haunted father figure that we got to know in the game. In the book he's a whip-smart N7 lieutenant in his late twenties and he's sent on a special mission to track down a supposed traitor of the human Alliance. His mission eventually has him cross paths with Saren, the most feared Spectre agent in the galaxy and the main villain of the Mass Effect game.

I won't outline the entire plot of the book for fear of giving away spoilers both minor and major. Plot summaries are also difficult and boring for me to write! As a whole, Revelations works as a nice addendum if you've already finished the video game and is invaluable reading if you have yet to try the game. Reading it after the fact, I thought the quality of the game carried this book and made me overlook some of its faults. The book is not high literature by any stretch of the imagination but sometimes even compared against the pulp science-fiction genre, I found Mr. Karpyshyn's written to be quite clunky at times. There was an adjustment period for me during the first few chapters as I shook my head at the hackneyed writing on display. After a time, however, I got into the book's groove and soon forgot about the writing style, focusing on the content instead and appreciating the author's slant towards action and suspense.

I'll give him credit where credit is due. Mr. Karpyshyn has a flair for describing action and violence. There are a few very graphic scenes and they were handled very deftly by the writer in all their tortuous, bloody detail.

This book has my recomendation, whether you're a fan of the game or a novice looking to gain some background information before jumping head-first into the Mass Effect universe. I'm impressed enough by this first novel that I eagerly await the next one, which is supposed to set up the events that are to be included in Mass Effect 2. Talk about synergy!

And here is the rest of it.