Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon

Duke is offered $15,000 to paint a mural. The job comes with one condition: before he agrees, he has to see what the client wants him to paint. What he is shown is a private server, a digital playground run by an alliance of some of the cruelest minds in the world.

The game on that server is Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon, a survival horror title with full-immersion play. Elves and dwarves fight alongside technology in its fantasy setting, and giant monsters roam the hills to guard the gates of heaven against demons. The player takes the role of the last battlefield surgeon, a healer whose task is to keep the behemoths alive at all costs.

The server's members have no interest in that premise. They come for the game's pain system: full pain, realistic anatomy, and the means to push a victim far past the body's breaking point, then revive them and start again.

Duke is trapped inside this nightmare with one aim, which is to survive. Surviving means playing, and playing means winning. The book is brutal horror, and it asks what Duke will have to turn into to get out.