Review of “Secrets of the Sealed Forest” by J.T. Tenera

Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

All adventures start with a dream. All fantasies start with imagination. Where will you dreams and fantasies take you? And are you willing to pay the price to fulfill them?

Secrets of the Sealed Forest by J.T. Tenera is a meta novel that blends aspects of gamelit, sci-fi, and action/adventure storytelling. The novel follows a gamer, streamer, and internet personality (influencer) named Joseph who lives, eat, sleeps, and breathes video games, so much so that he dreams about being in one!

Realizing that living in a video game world is probably unfeasible, Joseph does the next best thing: try to be the biggest, baddest, most famous gamer on the internet!

Unfortunately, his ego and quest for internet stardom get the best of him as it causes him to jump at the opportunity to demo an unreleased, hotly-anticipated game called Call of Echo 3: True Honor (implied to be a blend of Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Baldur's Gate III). His goal becomes to play and stream the game before anyone else in the Twitch & YouTube streaming communities can—to be the one to have the big scoop.

Alongside his best-friend, Eric, he accepts an invite to come to a tropical island littered with inventions and technology created by the man who sent the invite, Dr. Benjamin Thessit (often just called “Dr. Ben”). By the way, Dr. Ben insists that they not tell anyone, which causes Joseph and Eric—like the geniuses they are—to not tell their parents or families where they're heading.

Anyway, as you might have guessed, this “gaming” invitation isn't quite what it seems. In fact, this isn't quite virtual reality. MAGIC is real, and so are the characters!

Dr. Ben springs a challenge on Joseph and Eric to find a magical stone that was taken by a colleague, leading into an action-packed adventure!

Joseph and Eric find themselves on a “side-quest” to recover the magical artifact, all the while unlocking the literal and metaphorical magic within themselves!

Secrets of the Sealed Forest will go down as one of the shining lights and surprises of the season. It is a book that really spoke to us since it dealt with things that we're familiar with: video games, influencers, Twitch streamers, content creation, etc.

Something we really loved about the book is how it pays tribute to gaming and gaming history. There are numerous homages that made us smile, including:

• The mushrooms you can jump on (like in Mario Bros)
• The “Timeless Fantasy” victory theme (an allusion to Final Fantasy's iconic victory theme)
• “Master of unlocking” (referencing Resident Evil and Jill Valentine)
• Joseph's last name (Erif) may be a combination of Aerith and (Cloud) Strife's names, which also serves as the name of his main magic spell
• The phrase “level up”

These are just a handful of example.

It's also quite entertaining and humorous that even Joseph has some beef with another internet personality named Clyde Foristen, a pompous rich boy who probably has all his games and consoles paid for by his parents. It made us think about how YouTubers in real life will develop beefs and become the talk of the internet rumor mills because of it.

The writing in this book is also quite eloquent at times. For example, the quote:

“...sometimes it's better to follow the flow of fate rather than to fight its current.”

One thing this book had against it was its pacing. It was a little bit too long and dragged in its last half. In fact, the setup itself was probably more interesting and better executed than the adventure. Usually, the opposite is true. It was also missing a gorgeous, beautiful, compelling female character. A little feminine touch would've been nice to see in a book like this.

But all in all, it was an enjoyable experience.

Check it out on Amazon!