The end of the world has arrived.
Luca Fernandez was lucky to escape the slaughter that was Emergence Day when monsters overwhelmed the world. By plan or by luck, Luca was granted the legendary power of the Angel of Death and thrust into the fantastic and terrible inner realm of the World Dungeon. He has but one task, to survive and win the Genesis Game. But if he’s to win, Luca will need to learn that not all monsters are obvious, and the path to power is rarely straightforward, corrupting all those who seek it.
Can Luca learn to meet the perils of the World Dungeon, and begin to forge trustworthy alliances to survive this cruel and merciless world, or will he fall to the dark dwellers of this realm?
Can he grow his powers strong enough to defeat the World Dungeon’s deadliest denizens?
When partnerships are short-lived and often corrupted by fear and malice, how will Luca ensure he does not succumb?
My Opinion: 305 pages, $2.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is an apocalypse dungeon story that frankly takes too long to get to any kind of RPG progression. It's dark, but that aspect got boring as I kept waiting for something RPG related to appear. It does so about the 20% mark when the main character (MC), a kid who can't walk, is thrown into a dungeon and bonds with the dark deity there thus gaining access to the RPG system powers lorded by the invading alien elves.
From the 23% mark on it's a dungeon dive, sort of. The tone of the novel is dark with everyone looking to hurt everyone else or take advantage of them to survive. But beyond that there's not much that stands out.
The world is dark with everyone being super selfish and willing to sacrifice anyone to get ahead, but it doesn’t make sense why they’re like that. At the beginning of the novel the RPG apocalypse happens, and monsters appear. Great with you. But then after only a few days of waiting, it feels like the entire universe just did a 180 turn and turned into selfish jerks with no real transition between. Some of that can sorta be explained in the story with some time stuff, but it never really felt well developed to me.
Another thing that stopped me from enjoying the story more was the emotional/mental inconsistency of the MC. He's a whiny kid when the apocalypse hits and is thrown into the dungeon. But after he is transformed his thoughts and internal dialogue are of an adult that is bitter, vengeful, and driven to become powerful.
Despite the dark tone, I was frankly bored. I know the story is supposed to be building the world but I got tired of nothing happening. It was disappointing that for a world of dungeon diving, no actual dives happen till the 70% mark. Even then it's the MC being power leveled by the guild he joins in the dungeon. He's doing very little power gain based on his own efforts. He gets boosted stats, a new race, and a class from a dark deity. He's power leveled by his guild and his summoned demon. The MC is meant to be a dark badass but he doesn't actually do much of anything till the end of the story.
Yet, that ending was almost enough to redeem the story for me. The last minute betrayal and bad ass response was what I'd wanted to see the entire story.
Overall, most of the story didn’t work for me. While I enjoyed the very end of the novella, I was kinda bored until the 80% mark. I’ll give the next story a shot and hope future novellas continue the better pacing.
Score: 6 out of 10