Hell's Glitch: Into a Dark Adventure. I struggled to get into this book, coming back to it multiple times, Sadly just not the book for me. Though I do think others will enjoy it. Thank you for giving me a chance with this book.

I'm rounding this up to 3 stars, and that might be me being generous.

There is a few things I dislike about this book. One being the MCs habit of reading the lore of any item he picks up, and often re-reading them. If he picks up two of the same item at the same time, you get the same lore told twice. There is also the fact that the author has tried to write the book in a way to educate non-gamers about gamer terminology. Which I'm not against in itself, it would write: Spam (use repeatedly in an exploitative manner). And that's okay, but then the MC would pick up a shield and said shield would have 10+ different types of defenses that was only listed as F Defense, and a bunch of other letters without telling us what those letters were. Why not simply it by saying it had x elemental defense? (because I'm assuming all those letters are different elemental defenses)

But the biggest thing that makes me dislike this book is the fact that what I enjoyed the most wasn't Sam and his character, wasn't him playing the game and leveling up. No, the most interesting thing about this book is what is happening outside the game, in the room where the game developers are sitting. And that's just plain backward for an litrpg book imo.

Not to mention that the game is basically a dark souls rip-off, and that includes only being able to level up and boosts stats when one is resting at a fire, and that means the joy of leveling up and getting stronger kind of vanished from the book when the book would just skip the point where the MC went and grinded out mobs and then came back and jumped up 4 levels. Of course, dark souls fans might love this book. There is quite a focus on combat and outplaying monsters and players. But I've always been a bigger fan of levels, skills and loot. I wish the blurb had been upfront about what kind of game it was, so I was mentally prepared for this sort of game.

One thing that I did enjoy in this book was the pvp. Just like in Dark Souls, you can visit another players realm and kill them. In most mmorpgs, and thus in most litrpg that is designed like an mmorpg, PKing is frowned upon and usually morally wrong.
That's not always very realistic with todays gaming scene, I know in certain asian mmorpgs it's a big no-no but most western games devolve into killing fests. Atleast in my experience.

But in (most) Litrpg, only bad guys PK. In this book, you got to see the joy of ganking your friends and trying to outplay the other player. Which strung a familiar chord with me, because outplaying someone can be quite thrilling if it is on equal footing.