Fantasy

Review: Glitched by Tiffany Yao

October 18, 2025

Synopsis:

Kashmira lived an ordinary life until an army of invaders sacked her city and left her for dead. When she awakens, she discovers she is a glitch in a virtual reality video game – destined only for deletion by the bots that hunt her.

Dugan is a bitterly disgruntled engineer who played a pivotal role in the creation of virtual reality games and the NPCs who inhabit them. Fired from the company he helped found, he seeks only revenge.

In a chance encounter, Dugan sees in Kashmira a tool to sabotage the games and avenge himself, and through him, Kashmira finds the help she desperately needs. But as they traverse the worlds of virtual reality and their friendship deepens, it will take everything they have not only for her to win her freedom and survive, but also to answer the fundamental question of what “life” is.

Review:

The premises of the book is very interesting. Most of us have probably spent some time playing a virtual game to a certain degree. We met characters that we enjoyed interacting with and some we didn’t. Thanks to technology the characters are becoming more and more realistic also.

Dugan and his friends are working together on a VR game. He is passionate to improve the game more and more to make it feel more realistic to the players. One of his business partners is more interested in earning them money. Once he plans to utilize the in-game experience for this (which comes with certain ethical issues) it results in them no longer agreeing on where to take the game. On top of that Dugan gets more and more attached to the characters of the game and when he wants to take it further, he gets pushed out of the company.

In the VR game we meet Kashmira, a character in the game, that suddenly wakes up after an invasion took everyone away from her. Characters in a game are not supposed to remember what happened to them a take a life of their own. They are also not supposed to find others like them and form a common goal.

When Dugan meets Kashmira, they start becoming friends and he tries to help her to not get deleted. She is a Glitch in a game not supposed to happen. Bots are after her to erase Glitches. Kashmira is not willing to accept that she is an error in coding. For her this feels very real.

I haven’t read anything like this before and that got me interested to begin with. With where technology is going, when will we reach a state where an AI is becoming so real, that is no longer possible to draw the line. What if they feel so real, that they become your friend? Would you protect them from being harmed?

The ending felt a bit too easy and quick for me. While presenting an interesting question, I missed us going deeper. While I enjoyed some of the characters, I wanted to connect to them just a little bit more. Overall, an easy read and if you are a gamer and have a bit of understanding of technology and coding, you will enjoy it.

🌙 Recension: Glitched by Tiffany Yao
📚 Genre: Sci-Fi
📅 Release Date: April 04, 2022
📗 ISBN/ASIN: ‎ B09WZ92ZDT – available in various formats
📱 Read as: Kindle
💸 I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.
🗣️ Language: English
📆 Pages: 254
⭐️ 3.75/5