Infected: An AFK Book (Piggy Original Novel)

The storry is amazing

I have never played the game. This was my first time interacting with the franchise. It...was okay.The main character, Ben, heads to his friend's house to see if Ollie and his family were okay due to the island they live on suffering from an infection that turns the infected into hate-fueled maniacs. There, he is jumped by an Infected and must escape, starting his journey to find Ollie and survive the infection.Now, the book starts strong. The encounter with the first infected was tense and a good showing of how to do horror aimed at a younger audience. However, as the story goes on and more characters and infected are added, it loses this tension, especially when the narration makes a meta-comment that refers back to aspects of the game.Also, it doesn't help that Ben is a bland protagonist. I would be hard-pressed to describe Ben, both from a physical and skill-based perspective. He comes off as a blank slate to allow the young readers to insert themselves as they read.Furthermore, there seems to be a miscommunication between the writer and the interior illustrations at times. For example, the first illustration depicts the first infected as a wolf person. The prose states it is a pig person. At first, I thought maybe Pig is another term for the infected. After all, the franchise is named Piggy. However, when the story introduced the second infected, the prose refers to it as a Wolf Creature, making it clear that the prose is referring to the type of animal the person was before they were infected.During and finishing the novel, I looked up more information on the game. I initially thought the book was an original story set in the world of Piggy. However, as I continued reading and researching, I figured out that is not true. The novel is an abridged retelling of the game. Each place the characters go to and the order they go to them is taken directly from the game. There are scenes taken directly from the game and even some lines of dialogue are included.Of course, not everything thing is directly taken from the game. In the game, the player is a police officer sent to search for a missing kid named George Pig. In the book, Ben, a tween/young teenager replaces them and George is now Ollie, Ben's friend. Some of these changes I believe were done to separate the copyright aspects the game borrowed from when it was a Peppa Pig parody mixed with the game Granny. So George became Ollie, for example. Other changes were probably done to streamline the story and make the protagonist more relatable to the readers.Overall, the story had a strong beginning that diminishes as the story advances. I would say it is stronger than the Goosebumps series when it comes to horror for children, especially as it doesn't use fake-outs. There is a sense of urgency and threat. It's just hampered by a bland protagonist and some weird writing choices.

Gave my kids nightmares