Help Wanted!
The Dark Exchange seeks to fill multiple positions for a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity. Farmers, soldiers, gamers, slackers - put your life experience to work confronting new species and exploiting… er… exploring alien worlds.*
Four brave applicants heed this call to action, and find themselves facing a dungeon so dastardly that they will need every ounce of their combined experience to survive.
But survival isn’t the only goal. The new hires must band together and create a base of operations where they can muster the forces to defeat the hordes of enemies that the dungeon will throw against them. A base where they can unlock the mysteries contained within the dungeon’s depths.
Welcome to Outpost 7.
*Hostile work environment guaranteed.
My Opinion: 303 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is a fairly decent story. It starts out as a transported to an alien world story with thousands of people finding themselves without their memories and told they must somehow survive on alien worlds they’re sent to. Then it transitions into a small group base building story and then into something weirder. I don’t want to spoil any of the story twists but there are some weird ones that kept me reading.
There are some storytelling decisions that I found confusing, like shifting main characters early in the story or adding new characters with little explanation or some jumping around on game stuff. Yet I found the story engaging, not just because of the fights with monsters but the social conflicts among the survivors who don’t know each other or trust one another, yet have to work together and decide how to advance their base if they’re going to survive. There’s good banter humor among survivors and a darker sense of humor to the story, and the weird story twists kept things interesting enough.
On the game mechanic side of things, it’s pretty light. Part of the title of the story is ‘Gamelit LitRPG dungeon core adventure’ but while there are some base building mechanics, there are little RPG aspects aside from the few times rooms or buildings are leveled up. The characters themselves complete quests and are rewarded with cash or special D-Coins that can be used to decrease build times, instant deliver items, and a variety of other things. There are other game aspects touched on like researching collected alien items, lootable monsters, but nothing like XP for killing or character levels. It’s also not really a dungeon core story as the story isn’t told from a dungeon perspective and there isn’t a dungeon that’s built, but rather a base that uses a ‘dungeon core’ to power it.
Overall, the story was a mixed bag for me. The game stuff wasn’t really deep enough or consistent enough to be interesting, but there was enough social conflict, combat, and just plain weird story twists to keep me reading. Overall, I liked the story but not because of the game elements, those were just part of the slice of life storytelling.
Score: 7.3 out of 10
Outpost 7 a Gamelit LitRPG dungeon core adventure: Book Two The Dark Exchange