UpStream: The Knight Rising, Volume 1

Urban LitRPG Fantasy Adventure

By: Giovanni Tio

Narrated by: Eilon Lipton

The life of Alex White has never been easy. After losing his mother at a young age, he took care of his little sister, struggling just to survive in a harsh, contemporary world. No matter how hard he tried, reality always hit back harder. Then a mysterious event rips him from Earth and throws him into another realm. Alex somehow makes it back alive—but everything has changed. The world is different now… and so is he. When the message [Player Status Acquired] flashes before his eyes, Alex finds he has one last chance to rewrite his fate and claim his place in the new order.

A modern LitRPG / urban-fantasy story where protagonist gains a visible leveling system. This novel will appeal to fans of Solo Leveling, The Beginning After the End, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, Re: Monster, and Arise from the Shadow.

©2025 Ivan Tiutiaiev (P)2026 Ivan Tiutiaiev

A few glaring issues

I’ll start this by saying the story is fun i binged all three. First issue and the one that makes this series DOA is that it’s 5 hours long in a genre where the absolute minimum length for success is 10 hours and no it doesn’t not make sense for the story. The first three books are book one with nothing of note ending the first two and obviously just split up poorly into smaller sections. This is the death nail because the only way to fix this is to go omnibus which is where all the problem books end up and it just kills sales because its in no way worth a credit for 5 hours of story.

Next issue is the “narrator”. He isn’t one. It’s like when a teacher called out in school for a student to read aloud and the student picked doesn’t trip over his words. Can he read it out loud? Yes. Does he do literally anything beyond what anyone reading this review can accomplish by getting the kindle version and just reading it out loud in a bland voice? No. It’s honestly inexcusably bad.

Now tie that in with the terrible cover and you may wonder why anyone would listen to all of this. It’s like a popcorn book. It’s very very similar to solo leveling. Theres just enough going on rapidly that you want to keep listening. So yeah buy it it if you have run through all the great books in this genre’s and are waiting for something good to drop it is entertaining as long as you don’t mind drastically overspending and can manage to get past the guy reading the book.