OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: David Dalglish currently lives in Myrtle Beach with his wife, Samantha, and daughters, Morgan, Katherine, and Alyssa. He graduated from Missouri Southern State University in 2006 with a degree in mathematics and currently spends his free time tanking dungeons for his wife and daughter in Final Fantasy XIV.

FORMAT/INFO: Level: Unknown was published by Orbit on January 14th, 2024. It is 464 pages long and told in third person from multiple POVs. It is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: Nick is just a simple lab tech, he shouldn’t have to worry about swords swinging at his head. But that becomes a daily concern when an alien artifact forms a connection with him, plunging him into a simulated fantasy world every time he falls asleep. Nick quickly learns that while the world might be fake and death just means waking up, the pain is still very real. Even worse the pain is taking a strain on his real life body, and it might not be too long before his body gives out entirely. To top it all off, Nick's fellow researchers have discovered that a devastating event is heading to their planet, and the clues to how to stop it lie somewhere in the game. It's up to Nick to delve into this fantasy world and find the answers...but he's only got so many more lives before he'll never wake up again.

Level: Unknown is a fun romp of a LitRPG adventure, accessible to both game enthusiasts and those who have never picked up a controller. For those unfamiliar, LitRPG is a genre inspired by tabletop role playing games and video games, where characters for one reason or another are aware of stats, health meters, and other mechanics. In Level: Unknown, Nick essentially finds himself in a virtual video game world, with an AI assistant, experience points, hovering UIs that display health bars, etc. While those who play games regularly will easily recognize the mechanics, Nick is written as a novice to such things so that the reader can learn the ropes alongside him. (Although I did beg the question: is the future so dark that an 18-year-old has never played a video game before?)

After the initial set up, the story takes a familiar fantasy bent: Nick starts out on a quest and goes on a journey, picking up companions, encountering dangerous monsters, and discovering the history of this virtual land he’s in. The story is mostly told from Nick’s POV, but I appreciated the inclusion of POV chapters from a virtual character that lives in this fantasy world. While Nick sees the digital inhabitants of this world as things that can be killed without remorse, Sir Gareth views Nick as a ruthless monster roaming about killing hapless villagers. His POV grounded the world, showing that to these simulated individuals, death is a very real, sobering experience.

As in his previous works, the author writes one heck of a climax; I found myself tearing through the pages towards the end. The one disappointment is that when the dust clears there are no real answers, just lots and lots of questions. What is the artifact? Where did it come from? How and why is it possibly destroying planets? These questions and more are all asked; while you’ll get a genuinely satisfying climactic boss fight, you'll get no answers to any of these questions by the end of this first book. This is the first of a trilogy (with all three books releasing in 2025), so the answers are coming, but I would have liked at least one answer to a major question by the end of this outing.

CONCLUSION: Level: Unknown is a good popcorn adventure that's a lot of fun to escape into. As a relative novice to the genre itself, I cannot tell you how it compares to other Lit RPGs. What I can say is that I enjoyed my time in this world, and I'm looking forward to seeing how these mysteries pan out in the sequel.