The apocalypse is coming but only those lucky or perhaps unlucky few know.
Silas is inducted into the System becoming the last in a long line of Earth’s ‘Forerunners.’
The rewards are great but the danger is greater.
We are not alone in the universe. The fate of five worlds hangs on how their forerunners perform.
Will Silas have what it takes to win Earth a place in the multiverse or will Earth become another mining world stripped of all resources and left a barren husk floating in the cosmos?
A system enforced secret… a deadly challenge… and only a year to go.
The countdown begins now!
As of writing this review, I’ve read the first published ebook.
Welcome to the Multiverse is your classic system-apocalypse setup. There’s a year left to go until the full rollout, and only five champions (well, Forerunners to use this series’ nomenclature) compete for points to determine if they’ll get the top spot (a gentle rollout), spot two or three (a dungeon-filled rollout with expected casualty rate >90%), or spots four of five (the world is mined and everyone dies).
These are some high stakes from the instant Silas becomes a Forerunner and has to start gathering points. Now, this is a good mix from what the average sys-apoc story might start with (starting roughly at the start of integration, with lots of chaos and the fight to simply survive). And indeed the juxtaposition between gathering points on already-integrated dungeon worlds during the night while everyone else on Earth blinthely continues their lives is fun. Watching Silas become distanced from the mundane and pointless nature of his college adventure as he grows in power and has to focus on, you know, saving the world, provides good ways to add depth to his characterisation.
On the flip side, though, these high stakes also take me out of the story. There are only five Forerunners. Each gathers points, and so having five high-functioning people grinding away is the top priority. But when the story starts, Silas inherits Uncle Dan’s Forerunner slot. But the man has been dead for two years. On top of that, one of the other Forerunners cracked a bit and is currently in Earth prison. There are three other active Forerunners, what the hell are they doing? Breaking the prison man out and getting him supernatural help? Hustling to get Dan’s position filled? No. Like how am I supposed to take the point gathering as a frantic activity seriously when the other Forerunners have just let positions go unfilled and underutilised for literal years while Earth drops down places until it’s a shoe in that the planet is going to be wiped??
The first interaction Silas has with the other Forerunners is one of them showing up to decide if he (other Forerunner) should just kill Silas so they can get someone more dedicated. Wtf, the role’s been unfilled for years, fuck off. The other two, before meeting Silas, have their own scenes where they um and ah about if they should help Silas and show him the ropes. Are you serious? The entire world is at stake and they’re debating if they should provide some tiny fragment of their help, some equivalent of “Should we send him an email with the tips and tricks?” WHAT.
It’s strange, and the conflicting messaging about the stakes does make the tension and pacing a bit difficult for me to follow.
anyway, luckily for Silas, the moronic Forerunners aren’t his main party. Because of their lack of guidances, he’s already gone off and set himself up on the first world the tutorial dumped him in to complete his challenges, and we get some fun worldbuilding about their corporate structures (ie internal power structures), and Silas’s actual party members. Silas has a bit of a struggle to try and fit in with the established party. They have their roles… but what is his? Some may enjoy Silas’s uncertainty, while I know others in the genre prefer an MC who has it figured out and chases their direction with single mindedness. For Silas, is he a shield mage? A healer? A tank? A bruiser? Obviously I’ve only read book one and Silas has many more books to lock in his direction and excel.
I think some of this lack of direction also comes from the diversity of challenges he has to face. Similar to stories with rifts or dungeons, you can have mini-arcs that involve brand new problems, or settings and tasks which seem completely disconnected from the broader picture. In one challenge, Silas is taken not to his ‘main’ dungeon world, but to a random place with two species trying to exterminate each other. In another challenge, he and his friends are taken to some corner of the universe for something like an F1-gladiator-spaceship-style race to earn points. Some readers will relish the diversity of chapters, while I know others will find these jumps out of place.
I paused after book one to catch up on some other works, and I expect I’ll pick up book two after I finish my latest cyberpunk binge. For now I’d say the story is a similar popcorn-read to other hack-and-slash style LitRPGs (Outcast in another World, Mage Tank, Ultimate Level One, etc), and those that like action-packed stories with a party focus instead of lone-MC will enjoy this one too.
