I’m in the game.
I don’t know how I got here, but I know I have a purpose.
From what I understand, you’re going to try to stop me.
If I were you, I would do the same thing.
Because I am coming for you.
And I'm going to kill you.
My Opinion: 320 pages, $4.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
The opening chapter is not written well. The short choppy sections, the 1st person present tense that seems to break the fourth wall, and the poorly formatted game notifications all made me want to put the novel down. But if you get past that the writing gets better and the story gets pretty good.
The story becomes a slice of life survival and action adventure tale. With the early part of the story focusing on the main character (MC) trying to get the resources he needs just to live and fight in this harsh world where he starts with nothing and another entity is sending people to kill him. It's a surprisingly rough start for the MC. It continues on this path of quests that slowly reveal the big twist in the story but keep up the action and even a few interesting puzzles as the MC adventures.
On the game mechanic side of things you can see the author's familiarity with tabletop RPGs and the story often felt like there was a DM throwing challenges at the MC. The game mechanics are heavily inspired by DnD 5e. The abilities and powers will be familiar to anyone whose used that system with HP tracking modified slightly. There are plenty of stats and notifications. Though the formatting for the notifications was not done well and would have come across better if they were left justified instead of centered. One issue I had with them in particular was how the author tracked XP was that it was updated by total after a quest but it didn't say that's what it was doing. So for most of the story it seemed like the MC was getting massive amounts of XP after each quest was finished and it wasn't being tracked properly.
Overall, once you get past the rough start the story is interesting and by the end the story has developed enough plot for you want to read a 2nd book.
Score: 7.6 out of 10