When Pyresouls released, it was a brutal new virtual reality game with a twist: be the first to beat the game and win billions of dollars. But after the Burgon Beast couldn’t be defeated, Pyresouls turned very real and unleashed an apocalypse of undead, monsters, and a System of levels and stats onto the world.
For many years since, Jacob Windsor has fought with sword and shield to survive Post-Collapse Earth where only ancient, Guilt-soaked weaponry can harm the monsters from Pyresouls.
While defending his bunker with some of the last refugees of humanity, yet another friend loses his life to secure one final hope. An enigmatic artifact capable of sending one person through time.
In a cruel twist of fate, Jacob becomes humanity’s best chance for survival. He takes the plunge into the past of the terrifying, fractured realm of Pyresouls, where every player is out for blood, and the monsters are more vicious than anything on Post-Collapse Earth.
Armed with knowledge of game mechanics, secret loot and enemy weaknesses, along with well-honed swordsmanship from years of battle, Jacob has every possible advantage against the competition. But the choices he makes have long-reaching ripple effects on the timeline.
Can Jacob beat the clock while grinding out Levels and manage to avert the apocalypse, or will his every action darken the timeline even further?
My Opinion: 500 pages, $4.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is a regression story mixed with Dark Souls game style. The main character (MC) goes back to the time when he just started playing a new VR game and tries to avert the apocalypse when the big boss escapes the game and all the Dark Souls like systems come out into the real world. To save everyone, he’ll have to use all his foreknowledge of the game to speed run through the game and beat the big boss. That’s sort of it. I mean, there’s lots of faithful Dark Souls mechanics in the story as the MC goes through the various stages, upgrades equipment and stats with collected souls. The end was a bit disappointing and was a cliffhanger, but I won’t spoil how. Overall, the story just didn’t work for me. There’s nothing wrong on a technical writing level, it’s just that the Dark Souls game mechanics weren’t particularly entertaining for me. The pacing was a bit too slow, and the power gain felt insubstantial and incremental, which is very faithful to the Dark Souls system but not my favorite kind of RPG system. Additionally, the popping back to the future thing didn’t really add anything for me, it was just distracting.
If you love Dark Souls and want to read a novel based on that game play style and system, you’ll like this more than me.
Score: 6 out of 10
Pyresouls Apocalypse: Rewind: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG Series (Pyresouls Apocalypse, Book 1)