Alex Washington will be tried and tested as never before as she suffers under the cruel torture of the gods in order to earn a chance to escape and outlive the eradication of humanity. Her one chance comes at the hands of Loki who offers her a devil's bargain if there ever was one. Become a dungeon and grow strong enough to help him escape his unending torment imposed by the gods of Asgard, and in return, she will live and have a chance to get payback on those who have wiped out humanity.
This book contains dungeon core/ dungeon building fantasy themes, gamelit/litrpg mechanics, magic, gods, werewolves, giants, fairies, vampires, heartache, and betrayal.
My Opinion: 311 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
*There are noticeable and fairly regular technical writing errors. Small things like missing punctuation marks, mixed tenses, misspelled or incorrect words. It doesn’t bother me but I know that bothers some people.*
The novel can be divided into two parts with the split occurring at about the 50% mark.
The first part of the story does a great job establishing empathy for the main character (MC), establishing backstory, her motivation, and explaining the rules of the game world that she’s sent as a dungeon core. The first half of the story also establishes the RPG rules, explains magic, summons and evolves monsters, and creates the levels of the dungeon. Unfortunately, that’s just about all that happens. There’s a tiny bit of action and the author also brings in a couple side character, but it’s mostly setting up the dungeon. Which if I’m honest goes on too long without any action or dungeon delving scenes to break up the exposition.
The second half of the story is where all the action is. A group of adventurers goes through all the levels that were made, fights the monsters, and basically does the dungeon dive. There are decent fights, traps, and puzzles. I especially like the last level of the dungeon and liked the theme there.
The game mechanics in the story are decent. The dungeon levels as it learns to take in more mana, makes more monsters, kills the wildlife or adventurers, and creates more levels. The dungeon can create and evolve monsters, items, and it’s own magic. However, the way those evolutions occur sometimes doesn’t feel logical. Some monsters jump from regular animals to humanoid creatures with magical abilities in a single evolution, while others take three or four evolutions. The game mechanics aren’t amazing, but there’s nothing bad about them either.
Overall, this is just shy of good for me. I really liked the first 3% of the story and thought it did a great job of making me care about the MC. Unfortunately, the rest of the first half of the story just had too much dungeon creation without anyone anyone dungeon diving to test things. So it got a bit boring after a hundred pages of just that. The last half had all the action, but by the time I got there I was already losing interest and the story had to work hard to recapture my attention. I would have enjoyed the story a bit more if there had just been a better distribution of dungeon creation and dungeon diving scenes.
Score: 6 out of 10
Loki's Daughter The Opal Dungeon: A LitRPG Novel (Tales of the Opal Dungeon Book 1)