
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, queer romance
Pages: 315
Published by Alcove Press on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Two video game creators go head-to-head in this delightful, queer enemies-to-lovers workplace romance debut.
Cat Li cares about two things: video games and swoony romances. The former means there hasn't been much of the latter in her (real) life, but when she lands her dream job writing the love storylines for Compass Hollow—the next big thing in games—she knows it’s all been worth it. Then she meets her boss: the infamous Andi Zhang, who’s not only an arrogant hater of happily-ever-afters determined to keep Cat from doing her job but also impossibly, annoyingly hot.
As Compass Hollow’s narrative director, Andi couldn’t care less about love—in-game or out. After getting doxxed by internet trolls three years ago, Andi’s been trying to prove to the gaming world that they’re a serious gamedev. Their plan includes writing the best game possible, with zero lovey-dovey stuff. That is, until the man funding the game’s development insists Andi add romance in order to make the story “more appealing to female gamers.”
Forced to give Cat a chance, Andi begrudgingly realizes there’s more to Cat than romantic idealism and, okay, a cute smile. But admitting that would mean giving up the single-player life that has kept their heart safe for years. And when Cat uncovers a behind-the-scenes plan to destroy Andi’s career, the two will have to put their differences aside and find a way to work together before it’s game over.
My Review:
Single Player, a bit ironically, has two players and two plots going for it that merge into one. After, of course, a truly epic boss battle that will have readers on the edge of their seats rooting for the player characters to win the game AND get the happy ever after they have so completely earned.
In other words, the story of Single Player is patterned after the types of games that the player characters – the protagonists Andi and Cat – both love to play. Games where the player gathers a group of like-minded but differently skilled fighters and friends in order to take on the forces of evil – and along the way romances one of the companions on their quest.
Although, at the beginning, Andi Zhang isn’t sure that she can bear the idea of adding romance options to her upcoming Triple A (big story, big budget, big expectations) game, Compass Hollow. Even though adding in those romance options is literally what Cat was hired for.
But the game that Andi needs to win isn’t the game that she’s designing – it’s the real world game of preserving the gaming industry as a bastion of cis-white-male-dudebro entitlement. It’s a game that Andi – Asian American and lesbian – has already lost once and is rightfully concerned that her literally life-threatening experience will repeat itself even though she’s moved both cities and companies.
That her nemesis has not only followed her but is waiting in the wings to take her down, again, in revenge for having turned him down – proves that the threat is real. (It’s really, real too, this shit happens in the gaming industry on the regular).
While Andi is battling the demons of bureaucracy and clueless oversight along with her own personal demons, she and Cat have started down the road of an enemies-to-lovers romance. Or at least that’s what each of them perceives it as. Howsomever, whatever they’re feeling for each other – enmity is only the mask covering up something a lot deeper and more than a bit schmoopier. Even if neither of them is willing to admit it until just before the final boss battle.
Because that’s the way that the best games lock in their romance options. And it’s a gaming convention that works every bit as well in Single Player as it does in Mass Effect and Dragon Age – or just maybe, even a bit better.
Escape Rating B: I picked this up because a friend informed me that the opening line from the story is a quote from Varric Tethras, and I’m all in for that as I adore Dragon Age. But it’s also a hint that this book is chock-full of gaming references and insider-jokes about games and the gaming industry. There’s also a lot of up-to-the-minute pop culture references that’s meant to either show just how cool or just how geeky and nerdy Andi and Cat are. Or both. Most likely both.
I had no problem with the gaming references, but got a bit lost in some of the pop culture. Other readers will find the reverse to be true. I looked up a LOT and it sometimes broke me out of the story.
There’s also more than a bit of the really, really real shit of the gaming industry in this story, and it was necessary to create the boss battle at the end that the story needed, but damn it was hard to read AND I’m wondering how many readers will think that part of the story was over-the-top when it’s actually NOT. Personally, I’m not sure I wanted that much REAL in my romance, but your reading mileage may vary.
(That the initials for the big gaming company that is funding Andi’s game are the same as a well-known gaming megacorp that has had some issues with exactly the buzzsaw that Andi faces is undoubtedly not a coincidence.)
All of that being said, the relationship between Cat and Andi that begins at Andi practically knocking Cat into a wall in her self-centered haste and Cat passively-aggressively setting up meetings between herself and Andi so that she can do the job she’s been hired to do, is filled with the stops and starts and human misunderstandings and epic interferences that romances in real life often have to contend with.
So the progression of the romance felt every bit as real as Cat likes to say that game romances do – that the feelings are real and the tropes mostly get avoided because they don’t really make sense – which is pretty much what happens here. Not that a couple of tropes aren’t tried on for size, but they don’t quite fit and that becomes really obvious to both Andi and Cat reasonably quickly on their road to romance.
I finished this book with a smile. I ended up loving the romance between Andi and Cat and felt really satisfied that the villain got as much of his just desserts as he’s ever likely to. That he’s left, as the big bosses in games often are, with the possibility of coming back for another round just gave Single Player a fantastic and absolutely gaming-appropriate ending.
Speaking of games, we got more than enough hints about the game that Andi and Cat are working on that I really wish we could play it!