Discount Dan

Blurb

All Dan wants is to find a way home. He’d settle for a beer, a bite to eat, and a place to sleep off his hangover. But in an endless, ever-changing dungeon cobbled together from twisted carnivals, abandoned shopping malls, janky laundromats, and condemned insane asylums, getting a bit of shut-eye is harder than it sounds.

Dan has accidentally “Noclipped” into the Backrooms — a bizarro, extra-dimensional Alice-in-Wonderland world overrun with horrific nightmare creatures known as the Dwellers. No one ever gets out. Hell, forget about leaving: if Dan wants to survive the week, he’s going to need to harness the strange game-like magic of the Backrooms, make some very sketchy allies, and carve out a little safe haven to call his own. And he’s going to need to do it fast, because Dan is being hunted. The Flayed Monarch of the 999th floor has marked him for death, and no one walks away from the Skinless Court with their hide intact.

Thoughts

I saw this on Reddit the day it launched, but put it off cos it seemed like a story just cashing in on Dungeon Crawler Carl’s meteoric rise. And yes, obviously this is true, and for the first half of book one the similarities are hard to ignore. The AI system makes snarky announcements full of profanity. Dan has a weird animal companion (Croc), a mimic that speaks and defaults to the form of a small blue dog. And Dan’s first few levels in the Backrooms are focused upon a frantic need to survive.

But fear not!

But somewhere around the midpoint of book one it starts to diverge via an infusion of Jake’s Magical Market goodness (the emporium referenced in the title). But the market stays instead of disappearing, I promise, though I do wish there was a slightly stronger kingdom building element of it given the sheer amount of potential the emblem has (gimmick which allows Dan to steal area from the backrooms), but a more deliberate treatment of Dan’s area is reduced given the timeline he’s on.

Anyway, the usual gimmick of each level being completely different from the others is present here (as you’d want from a dungeons crawler / tower climber). The Backrooms levels mostly have urban feels to start with (parking lots, suburbia, a mall, a hotel, sewers), before the lower floors start to do fun things (like have trees).

Characters feel drawn from clear archetypes early on, but they do accumulate texture across subsequent books. The system and skill design is solid, and the skill combinations and upgrades are fun both to read and then see executed in inventive battles soon after. The usual LitRPG problem of stats that feel decorative rather than consequential does creep in, which is almost a genre-wide plague at this point, so it’s hard to hold it too hard against this one specifically. The bigger frustration is the plot’s handling of the nature of the structure Dan is trapped in, which remains genuinely murky for a long stretch. Whether that’s deliberate mystery or, you know, I’m just dumb is unclear. I do read faster and late at night, so who knows.

Croc is the highlight. A speaking, shape-shifting mimic who defaults to the form of a cheerful blue dog is a great companion concept. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the mimics obsession with Twilight is hilarious.