Throughout the history of man, God and Lucifer have matched wits in games to decide the fate of man's immortal soul. Victor Goodspeed has just learned he's a pawn in the most recent game with his own soul at stake. Now, he needs to fight his way through Purgatory if he wants to find his place in the afterlife.
This novel is a LitRPG adventure through the afterlife.
My Opinion: 553 pages, $5.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure: I received an advanced copy for review. I purchased a copy when it became available.
The start of the story wasn’t my favorite and I was a little put off by the religious element/theme. In my experience, introducing Christian themes like: a monotheistic god, the devil, angels, hell, heaven, and purgatory aren’t done well. Either the story makes fun of them or it’s all too serious and turns into sermonizing. I’m happy to say that isn’t the case here. By the 8% mark when the dungeon diving happens it's pretty evident that every person in purgatory is going through their own version of a dungeon and the eventual late story developments make that more important to character growth than just a dungeon dive for RPG power. The other religious elements aren’t discarded, but they aren’t used to sermonize either.
The end, the last 27% or so, was great and I read that entire section almost non-stop. I’m all for a good dungeon dive, and the mid section of the story is that. But it's the end of the story that really kicked it up a notch for me. The story gets more philosophical or at least introspective in dealing with the MCs dungeon and it introduces a few twists that I thought were good limiters on the RPG powers but still fit well within the framework of what gamers would be used to. Moreover, elements and antagonists that I’d been concerned were going to be forgotten were resolved very satisfactorily.
On the game mechanic side, there’s lots of RPG progression once the MC starts to dungeon dive. Rewards for killing demons are currency crystals and experience. Crystals are a currency that can be used to buy special powers or abilities, gear, or just good food and alcohol. Gear, abilities, and stats can be upgraded with experience points and the number of abilities and powers (physical or spiritual proficiencies) that a character can have expands as stats increase. There’s even a bit of enchanting, though it’s never as powerful as I was hoping it was going to be. Still there’s a very nice detailed system that’s pretty consistent and that doesn’t let the MC feel too powerful despite some of the big gains he gets as he fights through his own personal purgatory dungeon.
Not to say the story was perfect. There were a few early issues with choices the character made were a little annoying. The MC had lived as a successful savvy businessman well into his 50s and is supposed to have been a lifelong gamer. So a few early choices he made seemed out of character as they were naive and noobish. However, I fully recognize that the choices were made to setup goals and antagonists for the MC and to create a reason to explain to the reader about game mechanics, but they still felt out of place. But by the end of the story the pay off for the setup was done so well that I kinda forgave the early annoyance.
Overall, the story struck a good balance between the concept of purgatory, a middle battleground where sinners could redeem themselves, with the action RPG elements in LitRPG. And the late story philosophy elements really worked well for me and bumped it up from ‘good’ to ‘great’. The story works really well as a standalone story though there is room for another novel if readers enjoy the work and support the novel.
Score: 8 out of 10