I’ve never read LitRPG and it feels like How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps is a worthy entrance into this somewhat strange genre. The book is a quick read at under 200 pages and it’s always fun with a tongue-in-cheek narrative style and a ‘hero’ who doesn’t follow the traditional mold. On top of the typical fantasy elements, I most enjoyed watching the group bend the rules to achieve hero-worthy victories. There are prophecies, dungeons and relics galore, and our hero has spent her life trying to figure out a way around them. It feels like a ‘guy in the chair’ style of fighting, using wits and cunning to get around dungeon crawling and monster hunting. I found it incredibly entertaining and will definitely be diving further into this genre in the future.

The Best Bits

A Few of My Favorite Things

The Tone

Tone makes up everything in this book, giving us a matter-of-fact, sarcastic journey toward a heroic quest that isn’t all that heroic. The protagonist doesn’t buy into the hero crap anymore – she’s tired of waiting for someone to come and save people and takes it upon herself to figure out a way to save the world. Every interaction is witty, every solution more intelligent than brave. It feels like your most pragmatic friend at the D&D table doing the small things to progress through a dungeon instead of racing toward danger, and it’s always entertaining.

The Level 1 Sequence

The first part of the book was brilliant. Those of us who have spent countless hours playing RPGs know the importance of grinding through levels to advance your class and skill. What’s an RPG without spending 10 hours of your actual time crafting iron daggers in Whiterun so you can create dragonbone armor while also helping with your enchanting and speech skill progression? In this instance, it’s the incredibly mundane task of moving a rock in and out of your inventory, and it’s the perfect representation of the start of a game-based hero’s journey. We love to imagine it’s diving into a dungeon but, in reality, it’s repetition until we can get to the actual gameplay.

Slimes

My favorite monster of all time is the Gelatinous Cube, and imagining an entire forest filled with a variety of slimes that help you level up is an RPG paradise in my humble opinion. The concept of a silver-plated slime that also breathes fire? Epic.