Level: Unknown

• Author: David Dalglish
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: January 14, 2025
• Publisher: Orbit
• Series: Level: Unknown #1

Thank you to Orbit and Oliver Wehner for providing an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

The magical world of Yensere holds the key to saving humanity from a horrific apocalypse. Too bad Nick can only get there in his dreams. 

When an ancient alien artifact chooses research cadet Nick to explore the world stored within it—a place full of forgotten empires, heroes with strange powers, and monstrous creatures that he is automatically transported to when he sleeps—he finds he has no choice but to grow stronger within the realm of Yensere to uncover its mysteries. 

But Yensere isn’t all fun exploration. In this land guided by statistics and levels, Nick is seen as a demonic threat by its diseased inhabitants and always killed on-sight. When he dies in Yensere, he awakens in his bed upon the research station, his body in a state of panic; when he sleeps again, Yensere drags him back for another life…and another death. 

Nick can only keep this up for so long before he dies for real. But there’s a good chance Yensere holds the key to saving humanity from a terrible fate, and so he ventures on, getting stronger and stronger with each new enemy defeated. And there are a LOT of enemies to defeat…

From David Dalglish, author of The Vagrant Gods  and The Keepers trilogies, comes the start of an exciting new LitRPG series.

Join Nick as he adventures through the incredible world of Yensere in this progression fantasy isekai. Featuring multiple POVs, traditional LitRPG elements, magic and fantasy weaponry combat, friendships, light romance, and sarcastic robot guides, this is the perfect series for anyone wishing they could explore the galaxy and fight terrifying liches at the same time.

I’ve only read one fantasy novel that delves into gaming, but I have read some of David Dalgish’s other books and loved them. If there’s an author who could get me into a LitRPG novel, it’s this guy. And I’m so glad I gave this a try!

My idea of gaming is playing on puzzle-type apps on my phone, but I’m not much of a gamer, especially not LitRPG-type games. So this type of scenario was new to me, but Dalglish made it a really enjoyable experience. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by John Patneaude. I thought he did a great job of breathing life into these characters and the worlds they inhabit. 

Nick is the main character, chosen by an alien artifact to explore a whole other world contained within the artifact. He slips into the world of Yensere when he sleeps, and Nick’s job is to find information that will help prevent the complete destruction of his world. But Yensere isn’t quite the utopia that it seems to be. 

Yensere is a setting much like Middle Ages Europe. There is a blight affecting the villagers, and Nick is perceived as a demon and attacked on sight. He regenerates to the same starting point, and realizes that there’s kind of a tour guide who speaks inside his head, who explains what all the stats that he sees means. If you’ve ever played a game where the character fights someone and loses stamina and power as they perform moves and wondered what the character is thinking?

If it’s Nick, he’s super sarcastic, not the brightest crayon in the box, kind of funny, and the type of guy you keep seeing everywhere. While he might not be brilliant, he is pretty quick at learning from his mistakes. And boy, does he make a lot of mistakes. He isn’t concerned, because he keeps telling himself that it isn’t real anyway. The stakes don’t seem as high when you can just regenerate after dying, until he finds out from his brother that his health is deteriorating each time he dies in this alternate universe. 

The vast majority of the chapters told in this book are from Nick’s perspective, but some other characters take their turn at some POV chapters. Simon is Nick’s brother, and plays a big role in the running of the (correct me if I’m wrong) space station on some planet somewhere; we also get to hear a little from Sir Gareth, a knight of Yensere who turns out to be Nick’s arch-enemy. Finally, we also get a POV chapter from Frost, a woman who is like Nick—a ‘devil’ who regenerates when killed, and discovers that she’s from a dead planet and searching for her sister, who disappeared.

I loved seeing how Nick interacts with the worlds and the people in them. Everything felt fully rounded out, and the world building was fantastic. Dalglish always does an outstanding job of creating these incredible fantasy tales set in alternate universes (universii?) and he has the talent to make them actually feel realistic. While reading this, I really saw what a LitRPG novel really can be: as engrossing and entertaining as a video game, with characters that are easy to empathize with for the most part. 

Overall, this is the kind of book that made it feel almost as though I was in a video game myself, and had me understand the appeal of RPG in a way that I haven’t been able to before. Just like Alexander Darwin’s The Combat Codes Saga and Fonda Lee’s The Green Bone Saga allowed me to see the inside mechanics of martial arts and street fighting, this one gives me an inside view of what it is like to play an RPG, although I don’t have the coordination to actually play them. Luckily this is the first book in a new trilogy from Dalglish, who could probably write a grocery list and I’d be glued to the page, so I don’t have to say goodbye to Yensere and the people involved in the story quite yet.

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