It started with a girl. One he had seen many months past, and only for a few evenings.
Her father, as it turned out, was a barbaric maniac, straight out of the foulest dungeons of the Middle Ages. Decades into the 21st century, the madman seemed terribly out of place.
Yet he was also a powerful mogul – and determined to turn the life of every man who had ever been romantically involved with his daughter into a particular variant of hell only made possible by the latest VR technology. All seventeen of his girl’s former lovers would suffer in virtual reality until they snapped.
The torturers had considered every possibility and taken every measure to assure their success. Not even death would offer their victims an escape. No harm would come to their bodies, of course. Only their minds.
For the first sixteen, the project succeeded. But the seventeenth was different. The seventeenth was Dark.
My Opinion: 360 pages, $3.99, Not Available on Kindle Unlimited
I’ll be honest, the first 10% of the novel was a little hard to get through. It’s a bunch of real world stuff that just setups why the main character (MC) gets trapped in the FIVR game in this out of the way location. It’s kind of a dark section with torture, a convoluted setup, and background info that doesn’t effect the rest of the story.
Still, after that section the story gets really interesting and becomes this kind of survivalist crafting story with the MC stuck in a high end zone facing monsters more powerful than him with nothing to either fight or protect himself with. In that section it’s kind of like Clan of the Cave Bear or another primitive survival story where the MC has to discover ways of making tools, shelter, weapons from bare bones resources. Then as the tech level increases and the MC learns more about the system, it becomes about increasing his powers with his unique race and the detriments he’s been handed. Interesting stuff, but a real solo kind of story.
There’s still lots of RPG stuff, with skills increasing, levels going up with a unique progression system but that part doesn’t become a focus until your already 20% into the story. But it does become a big part of the narrative mid and late story.
Overall, I liked it once I got past the grimdark torture and real world background stuff. I liked the survival aspects, the big emphasis on crafting, and the smaller solo story. However, much of the story is pretty slice of life, as are many of the author’s stories, so you have to be cool with that.
Score: 7.6 out of 10
Dark: Fearless Pioneer (Dark: Fearless Pioneer LitRPG book 1)