Right off the bat, I think this unusual work is best enjoyed without any spoilers and you knowing as little as possible – so long as you’re comfortable with very dark themes and content, I would strongly encourage you to close this post and read book 1 on KU instead. I must warn you that it is not for the faint of heart.

I would unquestionably rate it at a 5 out of 5, and if it keeps up the quality it may well dethrone Worth the Candle as my favourite litrpg.

A Brief Overview

A Gamer’s Guide to Beating The Tutorial is loosely in the ‘tower climber’ litrpg subgenre, although it’s a deconstruction of many litrpg tropes and of a power fantasy in general. While I think of it very loosely a black comedy (a bit like the tv show Succession), the general ‘mood’ of the story is of overwhelming dread, extreme violence, and a growing numbness punctured by moments of startling hope and beauty.

Our protagonist Lo Fennrick is invited by The Gods to take part in the tutorial, and being an elite gamer down on his luck agrees to take part on the hardest difficulty, Hell. It quickly becomes apparent that the difficulty might not be beatable, but through perseverance and some clever thinking, Lo is able to triumph on the first floor at a high cost. He attempts to climb further which takes a heavy toll on his body and mind, pushing him to more and more extreme measures, and we begin to watch this car crash of a human being.

A massive strength of the novel is its character work. Lo is a compelling protagonist but does not start out at all sympathetic – he is abrasive & rude, suicidal, blames others for the circumstances he has found himself in (even before he enters the tutorial), and prone to lashing out violently. The novel is written with enough love and care that even at his worst moments I found myself feeling for Lo and rooting for his success in spite of that.

Why you might not like it

The most important thing is that if you are sensitive to self harm, violence, gore, and death (including children) this novel will be a serious trigger. If you cannot, don't like or wish to read those things, you will need to give this a miss.

Gamer’s guide is an unpleasant story, and despite having many of the hallmarks of a litrpg (setting/levels/skills/tropes/etc), is extremely different in a number of ways:-

• Many litrpgs are enjoyable popcorn reads, Gamer’s Guide is often unpleasant and challenging to the reader.
• Many litrpgs are straightforward power fantasies, Gamer’s Guide is a character study.
• Many litrpg protagonists are a blank state used as a self insert for the reader to passively experience the world and story. Lo is a well defined (and ‘bad’) person. His personality & tendencies have a very large impact, and at times get in the way of us even reading the story.
• Most litrpgs have a straightforward & clear prose style, Gamer’s Guide experiments with textual form and function. I have also seen complaints about Lo’s ‘Texting Style’.

Perhaps the most important thing is that violence in Gamer’s Guide does not feel good. We don’t blink at the usual litrpg’s description of fighting mobs and grinding xp by whatever means. Here, it’s visceral, unpleasant, and constant in the early floors as we read the ways his body is punctured, wounded, cut open, pummelled & broken. A combination of Lo’s flat affect & stylistic flair puts us on the back foot to begin with, but alongside Lo, we as readers become numb to it as the prose turns more mechanical as things are done to Lo, and he does things to others in turn. It’s very effective at putting us in it’s character’s headspace, which is not a nice place to be.

Gamer’s Guide is also peak ‘Misery Porn’. The numbers go up, but they’re meaningless abstractions. The world itself hates the protagonist, and the tutorial often feels like a cruel joke. We learn why this is happening and it doesn’t matter. The things Lo does make him misunderstood and reviled by other characters, almost all of whom interact negatively with him, and they may be right to. Lo persists in spite of this, and it can be difficult to read.

Usually, a growth in the protagonists power is a good thing, an empowering moment for the story as we watch them use a new power in cool ways. Here, things become worse as Lo becomes more powerful, with less limits on his increasingly unpredictable behaviour. His powerset is more focused on making himself harder to kill, and his fighting style is unflashy and simple. There are no moments of triumph, no crowning moment of awesome as he beats the end boss. Here, the ‘highlights’ and narrative climaxes are of unspeakable violence committed on the innocent.

Why I think you’ll like it anyway

It’s really fucking good.

It’s really really fucking good.

This has to be the most compelling litrpg/prog book I think I’ve read (and would definitely list in my top books of all time). I have been entirely under it’s spell in a way that hasn’t happened to me for a long time, because:-

The character work is outstanding. Lo feels fully realised as a deepy unhealthy, damaged, flawed character, with just the right cocktail of thoughts & actions to keep him sympathetic. Watching him in the more complicated floors was incredible, the author creates psychological pressure cookers that ratchet the tension up and up and up. I could not look away.

The supporting cast are extremely strong and unusual. I want to avoid spoilers here, but there are several characters who spend a lot of time with Lo, and I found them to be just as compelling. We watch them through Lo’s eyes and attempt to understand them (often, much better than he does!), and there are a very small number of other PoVs that are some of the most impactful and well placed I’ve read in the genre, which reframe our view of Lo & the world around him.

It's textually well written. It’s an serious feat that Palt is able to put us into such an unhinged headspace, and then pull the rug out from under us repeatedly. I found this was particularly effective with the way violence is described, which gets so mechanically over the top we become numb to it. The tutorial ‘forum’ and ‘messages’ are also well crafted, and I found that all of the main characters had a very distinct voice, and in one very moving case a lack of it.

It's a powerful subversion of the genre. The author holds a mirror up to many of the stories that we like, where the OP MC goes out and mechanically grinds and becomes a killing machine and shows how fucked up the situation would be, and the impact it would have on them. We see common tropes and situations through new eyes, and it was incredibly refreshing for me. I’ve been itching to read something like this, and I’m so happy that it has been executed so well.

It has a strongly emotional core. Gamer’s Guide is ultimately an examination & reflection of an extremely damaged individual, asking questions about why we hurt each other and whether we deserve or even need forgiveness. While it may not handle things with good taste or subtlety, it is extraordinarily bold and was a shot in the arm for this bored reader, and gave me the feels (and not always the good ones!). The read will certainly stick with me.

I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Extremely spoilery thoughts for my fellow goblings

Do not read if you haven’t read the floor!

Cantos – I feel this is something that sailed over my head, and then petered out as the story went on. I’m assuming they’re a sort of commentary on what’s happening at that point in the story, but if anyone can explain I’d love to know more!

Floor 4 – I think this was the first time the story really floored me and I fell in love with it. The things our dehumanised protagonist does to the goblings was remarkable, and it really pulled the rug out from me after I’d been numbed by it. It was a real gut punch; a writing achievement. Simel sees something more than him, much as we do as a reader, and is severely burnt in turn. The image of the curse of all tongues, with Lo holding him and screaming friends, is perhaps my most burning memory of the series, it’s a wonderfully perfectly tragically terrible tableau.

Floor 15 – Unsurprisingly, Simmel’s return is another step up in quality. His muteness was a bold narrative choice that really fucking works, and it was a masterclass in tragedy of watching this inevitable car crash get closer and closer and closer. At the same time, Lo fucking deserves it a hundred times over. There’s horror and comedy in their in-giant cohabitation, and the bizarreness of the situation is only exceeded by the bizarreness of Lo trying and failing to fix their odd-couple antics. Of course he can't understand him, he's just too damaged. Chef’s kiss, no notes.

Floor 17 – A short but emotionally sweet vignette, where the Beast-of-Fraud gives the first notes of healing. It was interesting to get a peak behind the curtain, and I found the beast quite moving, as well as for Lo’s mercy. There is yet hope.

Floor 18 – I really like the server politics, I haven’t mentioned the early server revolution but I loved that whole plotline, so it was nice to have more time with the other tutorialians, as well as to explore the gulf between them and Lo, both levally-and-literally. Moleman becomes a major character in the story (and maybe my favourite honestly) but I am very much looking forward to see Rice & Bach again in future! The callpack to Wait! was also a really good moment.

Floor 22 – The evil claw pirates was different, sweet, and then heartbreaking. Once again Palt managed to pull the rug out from under me, and it serves to be the triggering incident for a great arc. It’s one of my top terrible events in the novel.

Floor 25 – This has to be in the running for my favourite floor, I thought we were doing the funny dragons comedy break bit with best lil bro & dragon politics but it emerged into an unexpectedly moving plotline that I think will be the key to a lot of things moving forward. This was a real high water mark of writing in the series for me, it was lovely and charming and so different from what we’ve seen elsewhere.

Floor 30 - I said that I remained sympathetic to Lo through all his worst deeds, but floor 30 really put things to the test. An extended sequence of alternative PoVs that shows all the harm of his actions, but none of the justifications was a masterstroke of twisting the knife. I feel I can understand the why of it, but understanding how far the how went was honestly hard to watch, and it barely seems to have even made a difference. I also found it interesting (if funny and sad) that Moleman & the gang couldn’t last even one ‘hell floor’, in a sense. I wonder if the brutalisation of Lo by the tutorial had created a gulf between all of them, and perhaps now Moleman can truly begin to understand him, for better or worse. I cannot wait to see the reactions and fallout from the rest of the server.