versus: the elite trials
As one of the prisoners trapped on planet Versus, you must vote for who will fight in deadly gladiatorial battles.
In Book Two of The Versus Trilogy, thirteen prisoners have formed a voting bloc, the Elite Courte, to ensure they choose who lives and who dies. But one of their so-called "gods" has a plan for revolution. Your power to steal abilities and memories makes you the perfect spy--or the perfect double agent--as you enter The Elite Trials. On Versus, nothing and no one is as they seem... perhaps not even you.
Will you choose to be male, female, transgender, intersex or a non-categorizable, nonbinary gender? Will you be attracted to men, women, both or neither? What kind of society will you build when you become a budding young god? Most importantly, are you ready to go on a genre-bending adventure that combines space operas, dystopian societies, fantasy epics and science fiction?
How far will your eyes see?
Read Zachary's Author Interview on writing Versus: The Elite Trials. Listen to the playlist Zachary built while writing Versus on SPOTIFY. Peek behind the scenes at the process of Cover Creation. Plus check out this Fan Art Gallery.
watch the trailer
PRAISE
“I think there's one thing that this particular genre is capable of that few others can handle so easily, and that's revealing to the player something new about themselves. A carefully designed combination of tough choices, good writing, and thought-provoking scenarios can force us to confront aspects of ourselves that we might never actually need to consider otherwise. For example, I think The Walking Dead did a fantastic job of this sort of thing. It's rare for a game to pull this off even in this genre, mind you. But when one does manage that trick, it can have a serious impact on the player, and that's just what happened for me with Versus: The Elite Trials.”
“Yes, there are action scenes and some of the trials involve choosing between various special moves, but the bulk of the choices are about making your way through the competing interests of complicated, slightly-damaged people who all think their way is the right way. It's a little dystopia, a little utopia, and all of the terrifying ramifications of both of those things. The quality of Sergi's prose is as strong here as it has ever been, and I ended up taking screenshots of some pages just to marvel at how well-written they were.”
“Owing to your character's ability to walk through the memories of others, The Elite Trials finds a nice groove through alternating between the waking world of Versus and the memoryscapes of your associates. Versus acts as an anchor to keep everything moving forward, while the memory walks let the writer's imagination run a little wild. One particular moment that I found really interesting was one where you are tasked with creating a world and the basic rules of its culture as something of a personality test. Do you have a beef with the way our world works and have your own ideas about how things ought to be? Well, here's your chance to tease them out.”