At first glance, An Endless Game looks like it might be a sci-fi novel. But take a closer look and you’ll realize — this is not a cover. This is a graphic hostage situation.
The first thing to hit you — before your brain even has time to form words — is the sheer density of elements. We’ve got planets. We’ve got sparkly grid overlays. We’ve got a glowing Earth, random interface HUDs, and what appears to be a cover… inside the cover… multiple times. It’s like they uploaded the original design, slapped it on a USB drive, and then fired that USB drive into a wormhole of recursive graphic shame.
Front and center are our two protagonists: a man and a woman, both stiffly posing like they’re waiting in line at Space DMV. Their body armor appears to have been Photoshopped on with all the finesse of a school project made on a cracked copy of PaintShop Pro. The lighting is inconsistent to the point of surrealism — he’s lit from the left, she’s lit from nowhere, and the background is being lit from all of space at once. No shadows. No integration. Just “paste, flatten, publish.”
The male lead is giving us discount space ranger energy, while the female lead stares off into the distance like she just remembered she left the oven on back on Jupiter. Together, they have the chemistry of two cardboard cutouts gently colliding in a breeze.
Then there’s the typography. AN ENDLESS GAME is displayed in an aggressive metallic sci-fi font with bevels, glows, and a little drop shadow — because if you’re going to commit font violence, why not go all the way? “THE COMPLETE SERIES” is sandwiched underneath, clearly added last-minute, like someone shouted “Wait! People need to know it’s COMPLETE!” right before the file went to print.
And let’s not ignore the lower third, where Odette C. Bell’s name looms large, proudly proclaiming “FROM THE AUTHOR OF WITCH’S BELL AND A PLAIN JANE,” which is somehow both impressive and deeply confusing. Is this a series? A crossover? A cry for help?
The crowning achievement here, though, is the miniature version of the same characters and title — repeated in the background multiple times, like a cosmic echo of bad decisions. It’s book cover inception, and not in a good way. These clones just float there, behind the main figures, like ghost versions of the same mistake, rippling endlessly into the void.
This isn’t an endless game. It’s an endless mess.
A tribute to what happens when every sci-fi design cliché is summoned into one Photoshop file with no adult supervision.
The result? Less “interstellar epic,” more “bootleg space opera movie poster found on Wish.”
Endless, indeed.