When you’ve maxed out your level, done every quest, and defeated every enemy, there’s not much left. So after seven centuries of immortality, Sean wants nothing more than to die. Afterall was touted as a paradise, an afterlife where anyone could pursue their interests, from archery to zookeeping. The gaming was the stuff of legend, but for Sean it had grown stale.
But when a woman from a past life informs him of a real, flesh-and-blood descendant that has hacked his way in, Sean finds a new purpose. The AI doesn’t take kindly to interlopers, and parks the intruder in the one realm so buggy that even the oldest, most powerful denizens of Afterall steer clear of it – the Bitrealm.
Sean must enter a land created for the original gamers, people like him who cut their teeth on some of the first video games released to the public. Will Sean brave the pixelated wilderness of Bitrealm to rescue his lost kin? Or will he fall victim to the force that has been making people vanish? One thing’s for certain, he can’t do it alone. He’s going to need a few members of his original guild.
He’s going to need some Eight-Bit Bastards.
My Opinion: 224 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
A good LitRPG story that starts with an interesting premise. What would you do if you had your mind uploaded to a game universe and were immortal? What about after 700 years and you learned a distant descendant hacked his way into the game and is now trapped in the most bugged place?
The 1st half of the story is mostly this speculative recollection of what its been like for the main character (MC) to have lived so long and done just about everything. Then transitions into collecting and convincing his old teammates into helping him, and it’s not till about 40% in that you get to the RPG progression as the group enters a minecraft like game world and gets their levels reset and you get humourous action adventure. The story is funny on several levels, meta gaming, good banter between group members, and there is good slice of life adventure here. The big draw though is the interesting world building, 8-bit nostalgia, and setup for what it would be like to be a digitized immortal who can never really escape his mistakes. A pretty quick read that i enjoyed.
Score: 7.4 out of 10