Ryan is a teenager in a dystopian world, deep underground, where he earns the rent for his family by playing the ubiquitous MMORPG. This is an immersive LitRPG read with a very sympathetic main character and plenty of game mechanics. In that sense it reminded me of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld, one of my favourite books in my youthful discovery of SciFi and Fantasy. But it also has a real sense of mystery, of our entering a massive alternate world whose rules we don’t understand but need to master to progress and escape. The book has faults: we could be made to care more about the characters, who are relatively thin on emotional intensity, despite a rivalry between Eric and Josh for the attentions of Sarah. The book is strong on LitRPG elements: character sheets, combat as game announcements (‘Your bash HITS the villager for 7 damage’) and levelling. The game world has vast levels, up which our protagonists decide they must ascend to discover what is really going on and, hopefully, a way out.Įrik plays a rogue build, Sarah a spellcaster and Josh a warrior. Now things turn serious and the need to level up and be able to challenge not only dangerous NPCs but also the power bases of other human players, who for one reason or another have managed to get a head start in the game. Disastrously, however, when the three companions want to leave the game, they cannot. A youthful Eric is the son of one of the developers and can sneak his friend Sarah and her boyfriend Josh into the immersion tanks to try it out. Hack: A LitRPG Novel (Tower of Gates, Book 1)Ī new VR fantasy MMORPG has recently built, but it is not yet public. If you’ve got a favourite LitRPG title that you think should be on a list of the best LitRPG books and isn’t here, by all means use the form at the bottom to let me know.ġ4. Since I first wrote this, readers of this page have been making suggestions and I’ve updated it with some of those, which is why it is currently a list of the top 14 LitRPG books. That’s something we hope to address here at Level Up and with both male and female authors writing LitRPG and Gamelit with strong female protagonists, there will soon be wealth of such titles. One failing of the list, which at the time of writing reflects a problem of sexism in LitRPG, is that LitRPG with a female protagonist doesn’t feature on it. It is, however, the favourite GameLit book of the Level Up team. I also didn’t include Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, even though it would have been up in my top five, because while there is a game of sorts in the virtual world of OASIS, searching for Easter Eggs doesn’t give LitRPG fans the engagement with game strategies and levelling that many look for. Having chosen my top ten LitRPG books of all time, I realised I had missed one out that I really wanted to include, so apologies for not having the heart to cut any to make room. Hopefully, you’ll see them crop up in other lists of the best LitRPG books! I don’t include our own Level Up titles in the list, this is a compilation of great LitRPG reads made as a guide to promote the whole genre, rather than our books in particular, but I do think Level Up books would be there or thereabouts. But these are the ones that I enjoyed reading, that are well written, have engaging characters, strong plots and, of course, a game or game-world in which the drama unfolds. Of course, it is highly personal and I don’t claim some kind of objective authority. So many, in fact, that a common question in forums is to ask what are the best LitRPG books ever? Here’s my own answer to that question. And the good news is that there are hundreds of LitRPG titles to choose from. Once you’ve been bitten by the LitRPG bug, you’ll want to keep reading works in the genre. What are the best LitRPG books of all time? By Conor Kostick
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