ESCAPE ROOM: GAME ZERO, by Christopher Edge, Nosy Crow, Feb. 10, 2026, Paperback, $7.99 (ages 9-12)
A girl is sucked into a still-in-development, top secret game in Escape Room: Game Zero, a middle-grade by Christopher Edge.
Eden is cutting through an industrial park following directions that Ami, an online friend, has shared with her to a new escape room. Eden has completed plenty of birthday party escape rooms, but The Escape is supposed to be the ultimate. She’s almost arrived when she sees the starlings. They’re flying in a dizzying murmuration, faster and faster, and suddenly she trapped within it, before finding herself in a vast landscape with gentle music playing.
Eden meets a boy named Ted who rudely tells her she’s an NPC, a non-playing character in the video game he’s playing and to stop bothering him with her side quests.
Eden knows she’s real, she knows the game is not a game, but she can’t seem to get out without helping Ted find the keys and solve the puzzles. Each puzzle takes them to a new level with increasing levels of danger, but Eden seems to be the only one with an actual life to lose. Can either player ever leave the game and will reality ever be the same again? —Synopsis provided by Nosy Crow
Escape Room: Game Zero is the second book in Christopher Edge’s Escape Room series, though the books can be read independently of each other, you do lose some context reading them out of order.
The opening of Game Zero is immediately immersive and leaves readers, along with Eden, full of questions. Eden finds herself in an expansive world where deadly monsters form out of nature and multi-layered puzzles seemingly come out of nowhere.
Eden seems to really be in the world while Ted can come and go simply by removing his helmet. And Ted can’t get hurt, but Eden certainly can.
Author Christopher Edge is adept at world-building, but the actual plotting could have done with some more fleshing out. It feels almost like the old-school game Legend of Zelda where you’d move from activity to activity with not a lot in between.
That said, this puzzle-centric book moves quickly. I suggest checking it out from the library.
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