This book really surprised me. I was going out on a work trip and wanted to find a fun read for my travels. For background, I have listened to some GameLit RPGs prior (Chaos Seed, Ascend Online, and a few others) and will be measuring most of my review based on comparisons from those books. I’ll do my best not to put spoilers in here.
First thing I recognize is the combat-pacing. When listening to some of these books, you have to manage the pace in your head. Authors will typically over-explain a battle or fight to where by the time the narrator finishes reading that part, five minutes have passed in real time while you’ve been listening. While I’m sure some (if not most) readers appreciate the flowery adjectives describing the fight, for me it seems to take me out of the story. If I’m watching a fight, I notice what is happening and not thinking about the superfluous description of it. This book did a great job in that regard. If someone got hit by a weapon, the author wrote that and moved on to the other action taking place around (and there is a LOT of action). That’s not to say the author did not use adjectives at all, but that he seemed to write with combat-pacing in mind and the narrator delivered, making you feel like you couldn’t disengage from the book without missing something (something I commend them both for).
Second, is the overall lack of tedious number recitation. As a reader, I love the world-building mechanics and learning about “how stuff works” in the books I listen to. I rarely feel the need to skip the skill levels recitation and I do not typically want to miss the in depth description of newly obtained skills/items/abilities/etc. But for those that may be reading this that do, you’ll be happy to know there is a markedly different method utilized in this book. The author still has some numbers in here, but most of it is not “Player loses XX hp from sword slash, or enemy regenerated XX from magic potion”. It all seems to be relative and assumed as if the author is saying “yeah he got his mana back from that potion, now let’s get back to what really matters”. Very refreshing and kept the plot moving. This also contributed to drastically cutting down any lengthy battle sequences.
There are a few other things that makes this book stand out but I just got home from my work trip and am going to hug my kids now.