Retirement means immortality. Immortality means adventure. Life begins at seventy.
Running on the world's fastest quantum computer is a very special game: one where retirees leave their flesh-and-blood lives in search of endless adventure. Weapons, spells, gold, experience points… These are the marks by which life is now measured.
Ethan Crane wants none of it. In fact, he never wanted to retire at all, let alone play a game for all eternity. But now he's on a mission to find his wife—a wife he just discovered is still alive and inside the game.
Nothing will stop him from reaching her. Not even himself.
My Opinion: 239 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Digital after life story with older MC seeking to find his deceased wife, whom he was told copied herself into this fantasy RPG. Only thing different is the various levels or wards of the game with the stakes increasing the higher ward you travel to. To get to a new ward, you have to beat a particular guardian and each ward is harder with fewer room for errors. Ward 1 - infinite lives, Ward 2 - 1,000 lives, Ward 3 - 100 lives, Ward 4 - 10 lives.
There’s over long transition where he’s being uploaded into the game that I thought was unneeded, but he’s in the game by 10% mark. His goal is to reach level 25 where only then he’ll get a guide to his wife who is for some reason in a sleeping beauty situation.
Personally, I disliked the opening because it has this cyberpunk undertone. Which for me meant that the information I was given in that section was going to be full of falsehoods and deceptions meant to setup twists in the story that would likely subvert the RPG aspects and make them less important if not irrelevant. And to some degree my guess was right. NPCs are self aware and hate their roles and often have powers to alter the game in small ways. There are also several social mechanics that are completely unimportant and actually change based upon what the individual player believes. But worst of all is the cliffhanger end that kills an interesting quest line and makes all the leveling stuff that came before feel like it did not really matter. As far as the plot to get to Ward 2, you could jump from the 10% mark when the main character (MC) enters the game to the 95% mark and it would be the same. It’s a very cliffhanger ending.
There are some decent dungeon dives and RPG stuff including leveling, a character sheet, stat, class, and skill points, as well as XP and quests. I was especially looking forward to seeing how the last game quest line was going to work out, unfortunately all the RPG ultimately didn’t matter to the ‘plot’ except as an arbitrary level point to advance the story.
Overall, the XP grind stuff is pretty decent. Reasonably good action descriptions, good party build, and varied monsters to fight. But the end of the novel ruined it all for me.
Score: 6 out of 10
Mythian (Chronicles of Ethan Book 1) (Oct. 25th, 2019)