Reviews

Lally's Game is a combination of three short stories consisting of the same thing, robotic children, in good Scott Cawthon fashion. Between all the three stories, they were all individually creepy in their own way.

This story was a little more terrifying than I thought it was going to be. The first was a robotic girl killing herself, the second a hide-and-seek robot, and the last was on a girl stuck in an AR simulation that she can't escape and ends up fused to it.

Content Warnings

Graphic: Cancer, Child death, and Death

Moderate: Grief, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Death of parent

Minor: Car accident

Spoiler

Robot children anyone? This is all this book was and it was honestly creepy. I haven’t read the rest of the books that were in the series, I just decided to pick this up because I fell in love with the pizzaplex game. The first little short story is about a girl who is helping other kids but in the process she is actually killing herself. Each time she heals a kid, she starts coughing up these robotic parts. It’s a gift and a curse at the same time because she can’t help herself. She works part-time at a hospital at the children’s wing as well. She first saves a kid that is dying on the side of the road. She then tries to live a normal life but finds a kid in the hospital and gives them a piece of her life. Afterwards, she starts hanging out with a kid in her class and is experiencing a lot of turmoil. While she wants to save people, she knows it is limited and that she can’t live a life for herself. Her last piece of life is given to a child in the hospital wing and that’s the last time she’s seen as she turns into a pile of metal parts. The second story is a little darker. A couple is about to get married near the man’s family home. They’re excited and getting rid of some of their possessions to make room in their new house. However, the man doesn’t want to get rid of one particular chest that has been with him for a long time. The woman is obviously curious about it but doesn’t ask much about the trunk. They move closer to his home and she starts to ask questions to her new mother-in-law about his childhood. She tells the woman that when he was a child the pizzaplex was his favorite place and his favorite attraction was Lally’s Game. But then an accident happened and he stopped going to Lally’s Game. The wife became more curious about her husband not telling her about an important time in his childhood and decided to question him about it but he never talked. The wife went back to her mother-in-law and questioned her a bit more only to get pushed to the side. The wife became curious about the chest and decided she was going to get it open. She manages to open the chest and before she can look inside the chest, her husband finds her and opens the chest to reveal nothing was in it. After a while of her husband constantly going through the house, she asked her husband what was going on. He told her that Lally was infatuated with him and that a kid decided to join them and Lally killed that kid. Afterwards, they attempted to close the attraction but Lally disappeared and started appearing around his home. So, he chose to put the chest in the middle of the room and locked Lally in it, but the wife didn’t believe him. It wasn’t until she spotted Lally that she was distraught by the appearance. She went to her mother-in-law’s house and she told her that Lally didn’t move, the kids had to move him. The wife went back home and started to pack up her belongings, believing her husband was the one who murdered the child. The wife bashed the husband in the head and hid in the closet. When the husband finally woke up he went to the chest and saw that his wife was dead in the chest. In the next scene he was with a new woman who was now asking about the chest. The last story had to be the creepiest for me. This girl is hanging out with her friend’s at the pizzaplex when she wants to go into their newest attraction, the AR simulation. The AR simulation is a combination between VR and the real world. You can touch, taste, hear, smell, and anything you can do in the real world can happen in AR. However, when they go over they realize that the attraction is down, however, it doesn’t stop her from going under and trying the AR attraction because she wants her wish, even if it isn’t real, a big birthday party. When she sits in the AR she gets her wish, leaves the attraction and goes to the themed roller coaster then goes home. However, it isn’t until almost a year goes by that her grandparents have been diagnosed with cancer. After several more months, everyone is getting cancer and dropping dead and the new babies are these weird jelly humanoids. The very end is her thinking that she is still stuck in the AR simulation and gets suffocated by the jelly humanoids. This book was honestly spooky to me for a YA book, this wasn’t what I was expecting. I read Goosebumps as a kid and even some ghost stories. I watched a number of horror movies too and watched a lot of paranormal activity as well, but this book I had to put down several times because it was kind of creepy. I thought this was a pretty good story and I could actually see myself re-reading this story. I can’t wait to read the rest of the stories because I know how creepy they are.

Spoiler

jamie_reads23's review

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

dravens_deathcrush's review

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dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

lilfox's review

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

lilacwhisker's review

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mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

Probably the last of these books I will ever buy. There’s just so much wrong with them it’s hard to list, but I’ve made some key points.

-The whole “I’m not like other girls” thing keeps being used in like every other girl main character and it is really annoying and poorly written. Every character that is part of this trope is so boring and unlikeable, and I for sure saw this in the first story with Jessica.
-The ending of the first story doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read the first Fazbear Frights book (which is a completely different series so lots of people reading this book probably haven’t read it???) so if you don’t have that prior knowledge, the ending is not a great conclusion.
-The middle story, Lally’s Game was just boring and took me forever to get through (especially with such a forgettable main character who made very strange choices), and even then it’s probably the least bad story.
-The third story started off fine, but then it took the craziest u-turn that was trying to be a scary twist or something:

Spoiler

the whole “everyone dies of cancer” thing was so weird and unneeded… how did that make it into an actual story??? If it was something like she thought robots were haunting her or something similar to that, it would actually be related to the games and stuff, but the blob-people and everyone she knows dying truly made me realize how bad this book was.

-I also would appreciate some better written diversity in these books. Maya, the main character of the last story, was half Puerto Rican, so maybe I should give some credit there, but it always feels like the majority of characters are very white and very beautiful (if I have to read one more story about a white girl with long black hair I will die) and if they are not, it is a major part of the story like in “To Be Beautiful”. Side note: there are also no queer characters at all in these?? In the 36 stories I’ve read (not including The Silver Eyes series, but still) I have seen nothing (gay people love animatronics, it just seems unrealistic lol).

Overall, my favorite part was the epilogue, which does not bode well for these books. Will probably not buy one of these again.

Content Warnings

thescarletangel's review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

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