Misleading description.
The book is not about a guy called Himmel, it’s about a sadistic, slightly amusing, but not massively likeable Mimic. The description of book 2 also doesn’t mention the Mimic, however I wouldn’t be surprised if it once again is the main character. I won’t be listening to confirm.
* Jokes? It’s really not funny. I’m not sure why so many comments refer to this. There are a few amusing parts, but it’s far from ‘funny’.
* Sex. Yes, there are a handful of scenes. It’s not overdone, and not excessively graphic. I would place it one notch below hardcore. Maybe at the racy romance novel level.
* Violence. Quite a lot, as you would expect from a book based on levelling up and RPG mechanics.
In this book, the Mimic is described repeatedly as being incredibly dumb, yet miraculously manages to find incredibly intelligent solutions to its problems on almost every occasion. This is sloppy, and immersion breaking.
The story is ok, but 4.5/5? Really? Only the absolute best stories should come anywhere near that level. This does not fit that description.
Ratings for LitRPG’s on Audible resemble the world today, with our curated news feeds and blatantly biased media (on both sides). It’s a self selecting audience that gives pretty much every book in the genre no less than 4 stars. It’s basically an echo chamber, where people reinforce each other’s views, and objectivity just doesn’t exist. There’s no way to judge any books in this genre by individual rating, and in this case, it’s description either.
Buy this story if you want a LitRPG following a slightly amusing but sadistic bad guy, don’t mind reasonably graphic/frequent violence, and are happy with a few almost hardcore sex scenes here and there. I wasn’t offended or upset by the book, but I generally avoid books about villains, and the rest of this story wasn’t good enough to compensate, from my perspective.