Neophyte World Builder

Blurb

Nobody told me godhood needed an instruction manual.

Everybody’s heard the story. Someone dies, ends up in a new world with a LitRPG System that gives them special powers. When I died, that’s what I expected. Except it turns out, I’m the one making the System.

No previous experience, no manual except a few tooltips. Just an interface, a few thousand Reality Points, and a fairy-like handler who won’t tell me anything that would actually help. I get to design the magic, the monsters, the classes… and then watch real people live inside the thing I built, all so I can keep the universe running within budget.

I wanted to build a good world. I’m starting to realize “good” and “survives the audit” aren’t the same thing.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read book one.

Ah I was so keen for this story. It’s been ages since I read a good civilisation builder (or base builder, or kingdom builder, or in this case, universe builder).

So maybe this was me not quite understanding the blurb properly, but I bounced off this one fairly hard because I probably came in with the wrong expectations. Other builders, like The Calamitous Bob, or even very old stories like The Land, generally have the MC part of the thing they are building. They’re part of it, interact with it, live in it, their friends and other characters are in it, and there is a strong personal and emotive connection to what is being created.

Neophyte World Builder is much more hands off. For the first half of book one, the story feels like it’s just the MC effectively self-narrating the authors worldbuilding notes into prose. Character interaction is very minimal, and for a long part of time it’s limited to the MC and Orpheus (the boss). She’s unable to answer most questions, won’t chit-chat, and when she does respond, it’s normally with brevity. Which means she can’t really grow as a character at that point, and becomes a vehicle for exposition rather than interesting dialogue.

She’s also introduced in a way which I find very ick:

Tall, angelic, and lovely, by my reckoning. Her sculpted body had just the right proportions, and the sheer, flowing robes left her slender arms free … along with an ample amount of bosom.

We’ve established the MC is dead, has no hormones, and feels no lust. So why is this still narrated with such a sexual eye? And why does the MC keep winking and flirting with the goddess, even with the author calling out the lack of hormones, etc. Like… just cut it? It doesn’t really seem to serve a purpose.

So anyway, what this means is the first half of the book is quite dry and entirely focused on that universe creation. Its interesting, but not engaging, if that makes sense. The worldbuilding is strong. The universe design is very fresh. I liked the innovative ideas in making a brand new world and how toroidal universe-planet toplogy has a unique set of challenges and how the author went about solving them. All of it I thought was fun.

When we get to the halfway point, we get some grounding via pseudo-incarnation of the MC down into one of the intelligent species they made. From what I can see in reviews from people further along than me, the pacing and the character work seems to get better as the story gets in deeper, but I know many users are going to struggle to make it through to that section. Concretely, I guess the very slow-burn long-setup lovers will appreciate this story more than people wanting faster pacing, action, or characters you immediately connect with.

I see there are some much loved plot points between divinity and humanity (so to speak) in later books, so for those who have read ahead, please reach out to me if it seems I haven’t provided an accurate summary of book one, or if there are good reasons I should list for people to push through to book two or three.

So for me, not amazing, but I love me my characters and their struggles and personalities. This story leaned a bit too much into emotionless MC making a world without establishing any investment in it or the process to keep me turning pages at 2am like I love.