I want to leave a review as someone who is NOT normally a fan of LitRPG… I read this book based on some reviews that said it wasn’t the typical LitRPG, and I was not disappointed. It is LitRPG, but it is an entirely different take that anyone with even a passing understanding of RPG game mechanics can enjoy. The “protagonist” is what would normally be considered a non-player character, and has no human morals and few human emotions. It’s sort of like a sci-fi novel telling about the rise of an AI in the first person.
Secondly, this has to be the best audio production of a book I have ever heard. There are sound effects, multi-voice, etc that blend neatly into the story without distracting. I imaging other audio-books will begin to model after the techniques used in this one. The producers of this audio-book have realized that audiobooks do not need to simply be a narrator reading a book – that audiobooks can share elements of films in a way a printed book cannot. The narrator is also fully on-point, which is important to me as an avid consumer of audibooks.
Finally, the author is writing far above the level of what I would have expected from a first time author. It’s not just a creative idea brought to the page nor is it a poor translation of a Russian story — it’s extremely well written. Bravo.