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Escapist Dream
In a not too distant future where virtual reality has become the norm, lies a world known as the Escapist Dream, where all kinds of geeks can live a life of superpowered adventures. It is a place where comic book nerds can become superheroes, anime otakus can date their waifus, and gamers can fight each other in epic firefights.
But then, something went wrong...
Two individuals – a shy teenage geek named Charlie, and a serious programmer named Jim – came to the Escapist Dream for different reasons. One came to this virtual reality to have fun while the other was sent to fix bugs that have been plaguing the Escapist Dream. Charlie and Jim would soon find out how the bugs have caused madness in this place, and must now work together to protect themselves and save the Escapist Dream.
But then, something went wrong...
Two individuals – a shy teenage geek named Charlie, and a serious programmer named Jim – came to the Escapist Dream for different reasons. One came to this virtual reality to have fun while the other was sent to fix bugs that have been plaguing the Escapist Dream. Charlie and Jim would soon find out how the bugs have caused madness in this place, and must now work together to protect themselves and save the Escapist Dream.
528 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 27, 2020
11 people are currently reading
132 people want to read
About the author
Louis Bulaong
5 books4 followersLouis Bulaong is an avid writer of the online speculative pulp, and the author behind the critically-acclaimed cult hit Escapist Dream and Otaku Girl.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 29, 2020
The Escapist Dream is an awesome realm of virtual reality that lets the user live out their own superhero dreams. All kinds of adventures await inside, except the software has bugs. And those bugs can cause madness and destruction if not properly taken care of. When the bugs start to get out of hand, a programmer and a teenage geek team up for the ultimate adventure.
This is a long read, but definitely immersive. The characters were relatable in their own ways. To me, I found a likeness with the shy and nerdy Charlie. Since I was a geeky teen myself, I found a lot of his actions and thoughts to be believable and easy to follow along with. I also adored Jim. Even when things got crazy, he was confident in himself and what he could do.
I’d recommend this read for fans of Ready Player One.
This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.
This is a long read, but definitely immersive. The characters were relatable in their own ways. To me, I found a likeness with the shy and nerdy Charlie. Since I was a geeky teen myself, I found a lot of his actions and thoughts to be believable and easy to follow along with. I also adored Jim. Even when things got crazy, he was confident in himself and what he could do.
I’d recommend this read for fans of Ready Player One.
This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.
August 10, 2020
When it comes to writing stories, a lot of authors always forget to put emotional and psychological depth into their characters. It annoys me all the time reading about how a character is "like this" or how "he/she can do that", becoming more egotistical in the process. A character lacking depth is a boring character, and no, his/her powers or talents do not translate to characterizations. This really becomes obvious with generic characters in GameLit or LitRPG, like how Wade Watts and Jason (from Catharsis) are written off as oh-so talented than the world kinda revolves around them.
However, this book right here proved itself to be different. I'm actually happy to read about a main character who's actually realistic, and most importantly, has psychological depth. I fell in love with the character of Charlie and Jim, who both not only grew in terms of their powers and skills, but also emotionally and mentally. The author really made a great job in making sure that all their challenges and sufferings actually helped them both grow up.
Okay maybe I went on a bit of a tangent with the main characters. So what about the story? Well the story is actually just as great! I've been a big geek in all my life, and it was enjoyable reading about how all these comic, video game and anime tropes, were mixed up and made fun at (like it's the first time I have read about a Star Wars fanboy going up against an anime waifu). The whole premise was weird but easy to understand, and you don't have to dwell much into the technicalities to enjoy it. Also, every twist and humor landed really well.
Overall, one of the best self-published books I have read this year so far.
However, this book right here proved itself to be different. I'm actually happy to read about a main character who's actually realistic, and most importantly, has psychological depth. I fell in love with the character of Charlie and Jim, who both not only grew in terms of their powers and skills, but also emotionally and mentally. The author really made a great job in making sure that all their challenges and sufferings actually helped them both grow up.
Okay maybe I went on a bit of a tangent with the main characters. So what about the story? Well the story is actually just as great! I've been a big geek in all my life, and it was enjoyable reading about how all these comic, video game and anime tropes, were mixed up and made fun at (like it's the first time I have read about a Star Wars fanboy going up against an anime waifu). The whole premise was weird but easy to understand, and you don't have to dwell much into the technicalities to enjoy it. Also, every twist and humor landed really well.
Overall, one of the best self-published books I have read this year so far.
January 4, 2021
Escapist Dream is my second book out of the fifty two books I’m reading this year – already, I’m ahead of the curve. Started on December twenty fifth and finishing last night, this 522 page novel tells the story of Charlie and Jim, two loners each suffering their own mental struggles. While Charlie is recovering from the death of his friend, Jim is struggling with his ability as a programmer and the death of his wife and kid. They both come to The Escapist Dream, a Virtual Reality hub for all geekdom. Jim is there to fix bugs and Charlie is trying to escape the drudgery of life in Wyoming, and their paths cross as they become partners in heroics.
I had discovered this book on a late night read through of Ready Player One’s Wikipedia article. On some articles on Wikipedia, there’s a “See Also” section, which can describe, say, what genre this is in, or books similar to it. The three for Ready Player One were: Virtual Reality in Fiction, LitRPG, and Escapist Dream, with a little note at the end of Escapist Dream that read “a similar book that deals with pop cultural references.” Intrigued by this bluntness, I had navigated to the Escapist Dream Wikipedia page, and the plot had captured my interests. It landed into my Amazon Christmas Wishlist, and I unboxed it Christmas Morning.
What I didn’t know was that this is a Self-Published novel. It’s noticeable from the first page, and throughout the book you can find countless grammatical and punctuational errors. The length is also possibly because of the self-publishing route.
While there’s a lot of positives to Self-Publishing, like you can tell the story you want to tell without worrying about an editor’s input, this book made me realize that Self-Publishing is a blessing and a curse. An Editor is necessary because of this subject matter, and the amount of errors on a single page made me want to stop reading at times. As a proofreader for four years, I’ve grown accustomed to taking the red pen to a page, and I want to help out. I know, though, that since this is a self-published work, it is not my place to do that. There’s a character who’s pronouns switched from she to he during the final battle, commas placed where a comma shouldn’t have been placed, and the page formatting. My goodness – the page formatting.
The novel is 522 pages, but, and this is a positive, those 522 pages were a breeze to get through. This is also thanks to the fact that the book I received was Times New Roman, Double spaced, size 12 with one inch margins on the side, leading to pages being taken up by one singular paragraph. Most books are very dense in their word font and spacing, maximizing the amount of words-per-page. This is such a minor critique, but the table of contents is literally wrong. The table of contents is basically pointless, as by chapter three, there’s a three page difference between what the table of contents says and what the actually page number says, and then by chapter twenty two, there’s about a fourteen page difference. It’s a quick fix in reprints, if a reprint comes, and I really hope it does because the story Bulaong told is pretty interesting.
The Escapist Dream is split into four different zones: The Library, Stan City, the Gamer’s Den, and Otaku Academy. The Library is a large library, with full recreations of Middle Earth, Hogwarts, and other literary cornerstones. People dress as their favorite characters, from Peter Pan to King Arthur. Stan City is a superhero landscape, which conjured up images in my mind of Paragon City, the setting of City of Heroes. Stan City allows for players to be any kind of superhero they want – from a lightsaber wielding Spider-Man, to an Iron Man-Spider-Man-Batman Mashup. So many ‘mans…’ In Stan City, players fight villains of cartoonish evil. In the Gamers Den, there’s full-scale recreations of video games, all playable in Virtual Reality. If you want, though, you can go and sit at one of their countless game consoles, and play a game there. It’s like inception – you’re playing a video game… inside a video game. Lastly, Otaku Academy is situated near Stan City, and it’s home to fans of Japanese animation, also called anime. You can attended school in a Japanese classroom, or have large battles on the baseball field.
Basically, these four areas all represent a certain convention for a form of nerd – the library is reminiscent of Literary conventions where authors and readers meet and exchange autographs and talk their favorite books, Stan City is like Comic Con with superhero fans geeking out in their cosplays, Otaku Academy is like those Anime Conventions where… I don’t know what happens at those, but I assume they talk anime. And the Gamers Den is mentioned as feeling like E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, where investors go to see what’s going on with the new games coming to consoles.
The world is not captivating, to be blunt. In fact, I’m not sure how this video game setting would work. I recognize it as being Soft Science Fiction, so you don’t need to wrap your head around the mechanics of Full-dive VR, but the video game itself feels like a chatroom, similar to Second Life. You can create your character and walk around and fight villains, but that’s it. There’s no sense of level progression, and the way a character gets a superpower is just by thinking of it. There’s no quests, and no “origin story” type of thing. A change I’d make is have it set that these characters can select their power from a long wheel of things. Do they want super speed, web shooters, and a secretly powerful strength boost, or invisibility, flight, and the ability to control enemy’s minds? The ability to simply think of whatever power you want on the fly is interesting in combat and action, but it’s not interesting when you realize how powerful this makes the player.
I think where Louis Bulaong succeeds, however, was in character. The twist villain was unexpected, yet feasible. And the characters had psychological issues that were realistic, as Bulaong has knowledge in psychology, adding a whole new angle that not many others would explore. Their arcs are feasible, and it brought up many questions about what it meant to be real, what would one do if they could escape to a world where they can live out their fantasies of being a hero – would they want to stay forever? The ending made me really sad, though, and left me thinking about plans for the future and how to be successful.
I feel as though this story is really rough around the edges, and needed an editor, or a few beta readers, to come on and fix it grammatically. That would definitely improve it a few points. The story was captivating, but I also think the ending chapters should’ve been split into it’s own separate book, showcasing the last two weeks of it in greater detail. It’s good in some places, great in others, and really, really dull at worst. But, as a first time author (besides the fanfictions and blog posts he’s written), Bulaong told a captivating story without relying so hard on Pop Culture Knowledge for it to make sense.
I will be looking at Louis Bulaong’s career with great interest.
I had discovered this book on a late night read through of Ready Player One’s Wikipedia article. On some articles on Wikipedia, there’s a “See Also” section, which can describe, say, what genre this is in, or books similar to it. The three for Ready Player One were: Virtual Reality in Fiction, LitRPG, and Escapist Dream, with a little note at the end of Escapist Dream that read “a similar book that deals with pop cultural references.” Intrigued by this bluntness, I had navigated to the Escapist Dream Wikipedia page, and the plot had captured my interests. It landed into my Amazon Christmas Wishlist, and I unboxed it Christmas Morning.
What I didn’t know was that this is a Self-Published novel. It’s noticeable from the first page, and throughout the book you can find countless grammatical and punctuational errors. The length is also possibly because of the self-publishing route.
While there’s a lot of positives to Self-Publishing, like you can tell the story you want to tell without worrying about an editor’s input, this book made me realize that Self-Publishing is a blessing and a curse. An Editor is necessary because of this subject matter, and the amount of errors on a single page made me want to stop reading at times. As a proofreader for four years, I’ve grown accustomed to taking the red pen to a page, and I want to help out. I know, though, that since this is a self-published work, it is not my place to do that. There’s a character who’s pronouns switched from she to he during the final battle, commas placed where a comma shouldn’t have been placed, and the page formatting. My goodness – the page formatting.
The novel is 522 pages, but, and this is a positive, those 522 pages were a breeze to get through. This is also thanks to the fact that the book I received was Times New Roman, Double spaced, size 12 with one inch margins on the side, leading to pages being taken up by one singular paragraph. Most books are very dense in their word font and spacing, maximizing the amount of words-per-page. This is such a minor critique, but the table of contents is literally wrong. The table of contents is basically pointless, as by chapter three, there’s a three page difference between what the table of contents says and what the actually page number says, and then by chapter twenty two, there’s about a fourteen page difference. It’s a quick fix in reprints, if a reprint comes, and I really hope it does because the story Bulaong told is pretty interesting.
The Escapist Dream is split into four different zones: The Library, Stan City, the Gamer’s Den, and Otaku Academy. The Library is a large library, with full recreations of Middle Earth, Hogwarts, and other literary cornerstones. People dress as their favorite characters, from Peter Pan to King Arthur. Stan City is a superhero landscape, which conjured up images in my mind of Paragon City, the setting of City of Heroes. Stan City allows for players to be any kind of superhero they want – from a lightsaber wielding Spider-Man, to an Iron Man-Spider-Man-Batman Mashup. So many ‘mans…’ In Stan City, players fight villains of cartoonish evil. In the Gamers Den, there’s full-scale recreations of video games, all playable in Virtual Reality. If you want, though, you can go and sit at one of their countless game consoles, and play a game there. It’s like inception – you’re playing a video game… inside a video game. Lastly, Otaku Academy is situated near Stan City, and it’s home to fans of Japanese animation, also called anime. You can attended school in a Japanese classroom, or have large battles on the baseball field.
Basically, these four areas all represent a certain convention for a form of nerd – the library is reminiscent of Literary conventions where authors and readers meet and exchange autographs and talk their favorite books, Stan City is like Comic Con with superhero fans geeking out in their cosplays, Otaku Academy is like those Anime Conventions where… I don’t know what happens at those, but I assume they talk anime. And the Gamers Den is mentioned as feeling like E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, where investors go to see what’s going on with the new games coming to consoles.
The world is not captivating, to be blunt. In fact, I’m not sure how this video game setting would work. I recognize it as being Soft Science Fiction, so you don’t need to wrap your head around the mechanics of Full-dive VR, but the video game itself feels like a chatroom, similar to Second Life. You can create your character and walk around and fight villains, but that’s it. There’s no sense of level progression, and the way a character gets a superpower is just by thinking of it. There’s no quests, and no “origin story” type of thing. A change I’d make is have it set that these characters can select their power from a long wheel of things. Do they want super speed, web shooters, and a secretly powerful strength boost, or invisibility, flight, and the ability to control enemy’s minds? The ability to simply think of whatever power you want on the fly is interesting in combat and action, but it’s not interesting when you realize how powerful this makes the player.
I think where Louis Bulaong succeeds, however, was in character. The twist villain was unexpected, yet feasible. And the characters had psychological issues that were realistic, as Bulaong has knowledge in psychology, adding a whole new angle that not many others would explore. Their arcs are feasible, and it brought up many questions about what it meant to be real, what would one do if they could escape to a world where they can live out their fantasies of being a hero – would they want to stay forever? The ending made me really sad, though, and left me thinking about plans for the future and how to be successful.
I feel as though this story is really rough around the edges, and needed an editor, or a few beta readers, to come on and fix it grammatically. That would definitely improve it a few points. The story was captivating, but I also think the ending chapters should’ve been split into it’s own separate book, showcasing the last two weeks of it in greater detail. It’s good in some places, great in others, and really, really dull at worst. But, as a first time author (besides the fanfictions and blog posts he’s written), Bulaong told a captivating story without relying so hard on Pop Culture Knowledge for it to make sense.
I will be looking at Louis Bulaong’s career with great interest.
September 26, 2020
The main characters in this book are Charlie, a teenage boy who has lost his best friend to suicide; Jim , a programmer who has lost his wife and child; and Launa, a brilliant systems administrator in the virtual reality world of Escapist Dream. Jim is tasked by Launa to find three bugs that are making the virtual world unstable and dangerous. Charlie and Jim have many adventures in the various realms of Escapist Dream in their quest to root out the bugs: Superheroes, Video Gaming, Manga/Anime, Literature, and the Macabre. I will honestly admit that I probably am not in the target audience for this book, however, I did find it overlong (620 pages) and tedious. I think the author could improve this story in one of two ways: He could tighten up the writing by eliminating uneccessary scenes and really punch up the action in several key scenes. Or he could divide this story up into a series of books that would focus on each area in more detail and make the reader eagerly anticipate the next book in the series. I received this book as a review copy from Voracious Readers only.
March 11, 2021
Have you ever wondered why some people get so obsessed with a fantasy that they slowly begin to forget their real life? Escapist Dream by Louis Bulaong transcends the limitless boundaries of VR/pop-culture fiction. Both uplifting & heartbreaking, this high concept premise cleverly comes to terms with mental illness. The book tells the story of a teenager named Charlie & a programmer named Jim as they use a machine to send their minds to visit a virtual reality world called the Escapist Dream, a simulated world dedicated to geek culture (superheroes; anime; video games & literature). But then, a string of computer bugs started to mess around the system, which would progressively devolve into something more life-threatening throughout the course of the story.
The novel has one of the most unique world-building in fiction. The virtual setting is pretty much divided into different "fandoms", mainly Stan City for comic nerds and fans of American media, Otaku Academy for otaku and fans of Japanese media, Gamer's Den for every gamers out there, The Library which is the home of literary geeks and fans of Classical (Mostly British) literature, and the Zone of the Macabre which is a place for any controversial media in history.
The novel was released when young adult literature characters and LITRPG characters were written as angsty, adult-hating, uber-talented and powerful Mary Sues, whose universes revolves around them (similar to Ready Player One &/or The Hunger Games). Our protagonist differs by not being overpowered or super-talented and smart and not minding hanging out and being told what to do by adults. Even though he also suffered quite a lot like typical Young Adult protagonists, he tries to be positive and cheerful rather than being broody (it also helps that he talks to people about his problems, especially mental health professionals).
All of the characters in this book are relatable from head to toe. They all have flaws & you can easily sympathise with them. No matter how much the geeks try to escape the real world into a place made solely for them, the problems of the former would continue to hound them & force them to face their problems.
October 2, 2020
First things first. I think the author should change the genre of this book from LitRPG to just plain GameLit (I'm strict when it comes to stats and this book has little to none). That being said, I friggin love this title. If you're a big fan of comics and anime and videogames etc, you would certainly like this book.
It's got a lot of pop culture references in it which made me laugh. And the protagonist, Charlie, is one of the most lovable YA protagonist in my opinion. You could really feel the turmoil that he and the other characters have to go through, and by the end of the story, I felt proud of the victory they have accomplished. It's got a lot of tragedy in it but by the end it was greatly satisfying.
It's got a lot of pop culture references in it which made me laugh. And the protagonist, Charlie, is one of the most lovable YA protagonist in my opinion. You could really feel the turmoil that he and the other characters have to go through, and by the end of the story, I felt proud of the victory they have accomplished. It's got a lot of tragedy in it but by the end it was greatly satisfying.
October 20, 2020
Bueno, bien escrito y cautivante
Un excelente libro, bien escrito y bien pensado que no solo tiene un mundo interesante si no personajes muy completos y humanos, que pueden ser super héroes o villanos al mismo tiempo.
Un excelente libro, bien escrito y bien pensado que no solo tiene un mundo interesante si no personajes muy completos y humanos, que pueden ser super héroes o villanos al mismo tiempo.
July 29, 2024
It can use a some polish but I can see where the acclaims are coming from. It's got a very good story and intesting characters, to be honest, even with the writing. It's kind of like One Punch Man in a way, bad art but overall excellent story.
July 31, 2022
Wooden writin, talling not showing 100% of the story and a superficial worlbuillding populated by one dimentional characters with identical voices.
February 12, 2025
amazing story
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews