Old Man Gamer

By: Sammyfantastic

Narrated by: Nick Cracknell

Sam hates his office job, but at least every night he can delve into Alterwhere and forget about stupid teamwork for a while.

The world’s hottest new cerebral reality game is a fully immersive mash-up of the retro fantasy RPGs he used to play on his dad’s steam account back in the early 2030s—the kind where you can eat a bowl of stew in the middle of a battle, fire crossbows underwater, and steal all the plates from an NPC’s kitchen as long as they’re looking away at the time.

As Sam sets out to solo champion monsters and drink mind-altering potions, he realizes the greedy devs are working hard to monetize their free-to-play model. On top of morally questionable microtransactions, he must also contend with a mob-thieving elf, the unexpected success of his alchemical experimentations, a mind-bending crossover of game life and reality, and—worst of all—if he’s not careful, he might even be in danger of making some real friends.

Old Man Gamer is a fresh and comedic LitRPG that pokes fun at tropes both new and old. A standalone story, it is primarily concerned with gaming, and contains some violence, a fair whack of drug and alcohol use, mild romantic interludes, and surprisingly little cursing (not sure how that happened).

©2022 Sammyfantastic (P)2023 Podium Audio

a solid four

narration and voice is great, story wasn't bad. not exceptional, but I will listen/read the followups for sure.

Low Stakes and Thoughtful

This book is a departure from the standard immersive VR gaming story. It's refreshingly low stakes and character driven. The characters are messy and a bit thorny but feel like real people, and will frustrate you like real people.

In short, this is a slice of life meets online gaming story that finds a good balance of self aware depreciation and serious story telling. I recommend this book if you want something a little different in the online gaming literature.

MC is Hard to like!

OK, I listened through this story completely and the language was very mild and no harem or explicit sex in this story at all. I paid for this myself. I almost put the book down because of the subject matter and the MC is not a very good person. Part of the story is his growth as a human being. The narration was great. The story is one book and done. I liked it in the latter half more. So take a chance. It brings up issues that could happen if we ever get that kind of tech. That's what Scifi is for.

well this was a complete miss

I tried this because I like litrpg and I was disappointed. It has a writer who says he isn't about cursing in the book, which just turns me off. I don't think every word needs to be a curse but I'm an adult I hear alot of them at work and it doesn't cause my ears to fall off. Then it has a lot more other things but that just got me out of it so it's a return for me.