I'll just copy and paste my initial post on the forums after I first finished it:

I’m late to the party, but I just finished this for the first time and… I’m honestly incredibly let down. I’m a long-time fan of the author - Heroes Rise has always held a special place in my heart as the first CoG series I got emotionally invested in, and I really enjoyed the first two Versus books, enough to keep up with their development via his other platforms. I’ve defended his writing for years. I also have pretty chill standards for games - I enjoy a lot of things other people dislike because as long as I have fun playing it I don’t really care about technical flaws - but…

Firstly, I agree with the person earlier in this thread who said the Heroes Rise tie-in was essentially false advertising. We were promised a continuation, closure, and answers - instead, we got an unnamed brief cameo in a single optional paragraph right at the end that answered nothing and had them not contributing at all to the main story.

The sheer laziness and rushed feeling of some parts of the book were impossible to ignore. On multiple occasions, entire event-filled days during the lead-up to the climax were skipped over in veins such as “a lot of dangerous and important trials were faced yesterday but honestly it’s just too overwhelming to think about in-depth so let’s move on to the next day” - what? The hyped-up Deathscapes journey is integral to the atmosphere and story. If you’re not going to bother to tell us what we did during it, don’t insert an itemised list of Awesome Things that supposedly occurred but that we’re missing out on. Just say nothing important took place until now. And the sheer arrogance of little asides such as “well, if you really want to know what you all did, maybe you should write the story for yourself” - we’re paying for the story here!

The romances were so empty and thrown-away, and it’s bizarre that Heroes Rise, a years old trilogy, had more in-depth and well-written relationships than this did. I tend to do one playthrough of a game for each romance option because I love experiencing them all and focusing on every character one by one, but after finishing this one, for the first time I honestly feel so unmotivated to do that here. My first playthrough was with Lady Venuma and Breeze, and the ending had my character Reborn to Prisca, Lady Venuma promising to find me and stick with Breeze but then being Reborn to her own area and remaining there without contact, and Breeze remaining stuck on Versus alone for the foreseeable future. I honestly tried to ignore that and told myself after the “we’ll meet again someday” conversation that it was still fulfilling, but it wasn’t.

Even the friendships were hollow - at the end of the game, I was told I was best friends with Pinkuju and that she’d been there every step of the way, but we’d barely interacted all series! It suddenly decided we were close because I happened to pick her for one single “who do you want to talk to?” option right at the end. The choice to brush off all of the major characters from the first two books in one fell swoop and make us play the entire last book with side characters was incomprehensible. It only resulted in the characters we’d bonded with and were interested in (and potentially had romanced) being pushed to the side, while after so long of waiting for this finale we had to experience it with new characters we’d barely spoken to and had far less personality.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve frankly grown out of his writing, but I also tire of the clunky pages of unnatural exposition and childish, made-up names for things and fake swear words. Like someone said earlier, I can’t take things seriously and be emotionally devastated if you’re throwing words at me like “blerg”, “Blots” and “Cadet Gadget”.

The rail-roading, and the fact that many players experienced an ending that outright stated “this wasn’t canon, try again” and sent them all the way back to the beginning of the lengthy book, is awful. If you want to write a set story with set events and a set outcome, write a novel. I truly think it would be a great one. Perhaps that’s what his writing is suited for. But if you’re going to write an interactive, choice-based game, this is not how you do it. You don’t promise choices and consequences, freedom and independence of action, and then throw out retcons and “no that wasn’t the right route”s. His games ultimately don’t let you choose what you do - they tell you what you do, and if you’re really lucky, you can decide how you feel or think about the fact that you did it. Often, though, he’ll just tell you how you feel too.

Sergei’s world-building and lore continues to be amazing, and I’ve never minded the long detailed run-downs because I was truly interested. His concepts and ideas for stories are also amazing. But that’s just not enough to pull me through anymore. I’m a character- and relationship- oriented person, and it seems that with every instalment in his repertoire, those fall more and more by the wayside to service his decided-upon ‘true route’.

I see that he’s continuing the series with a comic book, but sadly I won’t be continuing with him. We’ve been promised closure and answers multiple times now, and honestly it really does feel like we’re borderline being scammed into buying more and more books looking for continuations we’ll never get.