What happens when a programmer writes a litRPG and can't resist sneaking in every pun he's ever thought of during a code review?
You get Regicide. And honestly? I'm here for it.
I finished this one during a particularly brutal week - three days of on-call where nothing actually broke (the worst kind, because you're just waiting), so I had this running while stress-refreshing dashboards at 11 PM. Turns out, watching Joe grind through game mechanics while I was grinding through alert fatigue was oddly therapeutic.
The Sophomore Slump Is Real But Survivable
Let me get the elephant out of the room: Regicide is not as tight as Ritualist. The first book had this great rhythm between Joe figuring out game systems and actual emotional beats - his relationships, his motivations, his growth as someone navigating a world that's basically a live-service game with permadeath stakes. Book two leans harder into the mechanics and the world-building, and sometimes the character development feels like it got deprioritized in the sprint backlog.
That said, Dakota Krout is a programmer, and you can feel it. The magic system operates like well-documented APIs - Joe's ritualist class has specific inputs, outputs, side effects. If you're the kind of person who gets satisfaction from reading clean documentation (don't judge me), you'll get a kick out of how methodically the power progression is laid out. But if you wanted more of Joe wrestling with who he is versus what the game wants him to be, you might feel a little starved here.
There's one plot point around the midway mark - I won't spoil it - where something happens that feels either like an oversight or a deliberate setup for book three. It bugged me for about two commutes. I kept turning it over like a bug ticket with insufficient reproduction steps. Still not sure if it's a feature or a defect.
Vikas Adam and the Snarky AI That Lives Rent-Free in My Head
Okay, so Vikas Adam. He's no Ray Porter (nobody is, that's just physics), but he's doing something genuinely fun here. His voice for the in-game AI companion - this pun-obsessed, vaguely condescending computer personality - is the audio equivalent of that one coworker who puts dad jokes in their commit messages. You know the type. You hate them. You also forward every single one to your team Slack.
Adam's comedic timing on the pun delivery is what makes this work as an audiobook specifically. Reading those puns on a page? Probably groan-worthy. Hearing them delivered with this perfectly calibrated mix of smugness and deadpan? I actually snorted on the train. Some poor guy next to me startled awake. Sorry, random Caltrain commuter.
The character differentiation is solid - you always know who's talking, which matters a lot in litRPG where you've got party dynamics and NPC interactions flying around. It's clean, consistent work. Not showy, but reliable. Like a service with 99.9% uptime - you don't notice it until you compare it to something that drops connections.
The LitRPG Tax: You're Either In Or You're Out
Here's the thing about this series - and litRPG in general. There's a tax. You're going to hear stat descriptions. Level-up notifications. Skill tree breakdowns. If that stuff makes your eyes glaze over, Regicide is going to be a rough 13 hours. If you're the person who opens the character sheet menu in every RPG you play (guilty), it's basically ASMR.
At 13 hours, this is a solid 4-5 commute book at 1.5x speed. The pacing is uneven - bursts of action followed by long stretches of Joe optimizing his build - but it never completely stalls. Think of it like a deployment pipeline: sometimes you're watching tests run, sometimes everything's on fire. Both states are weirdly engaging.
Perfect for: train, gym, monitoring dashboards during on-call. Skip for: anything requiring your full attention, because you will zone back in and realize Joe just gained three levels and you missed why.
Should You Spend a Credit on This?
If you liked Ritualist, this is a no-brainer pickup. It's the same world, same narrator, same vibe - just with the balance slider moved a bit toward mechanics and away from character depth. If you haven't read book one, absolutely do not start here. You'll be lost in about twelve minutes.
If you're litRPG-curious but haven't committed, start with Ritualist first. If you're already deep in the genre - Dungeon Crawler Carl, He Who Fights With Monsters, that whole ecosystem - Regicide is a solid middle-shelf entry. Not the best in the genre, not the worst, but consistently entertaining and well-narrated. Though if you want to see what 'best in the genre' looks like when the world-building and character depth are both firing at full capacity, Towers of Midnight is my benchmark — different genre entirely, but the way Jordan and Sanderson balance sprawling mechanics with genuine emotional stakes is the standard I keep measuring everything else against.
The ROI on this audiobook is decent. Not spectacular, but decent. Like a refactor that doesn't add new features but makes the codebase cleaner for the next sprint. You'll be glad you did it when book three hits.
