Dungeon Lord
Another fun LitRPG story with narration by Jeff Hays
Highlights
- A brilliant opening scene and a fun “Last Starfighter” setup that doesn’t quite transcend the genre’s usual gravity
- Nails the “this feels like RPG gameplay” vibe
- Later books may deepen the story (I’m cautiously optimistic)
- Recommended if you loved Everybody Loves Large Chests
I was ready to buy Hugo Huesca’s Dungeon Lord after four sentences. Here’s a taste (lightly edited for length and to match the audiobook cadence, but otherwise straight from a promotional excerpt):
Later, the songs would claim that the last Dungeon Lord of the Arpadel dynasty faced his end with a glorious charge against impossible odds. That he met sure death with stoic scorn and a grin. That he jumped at the idea of meeting his ancestors at the gloomy halls of the Dark god Murmur.
The truth was…slightly different.
“Dung eaters!” He kicked a nearby treasure chest so hard that the ancient wood splintered against his armored boot and sent coins, gems and trinkets sprawling across the floor. “Look what they did to my dungeon! I would damn my soul again for a chance to rip the entrails away from those…those…HEROES.”
I love that opening. It’s the rare LitRPG hook that feels like a classic fantasy premise with teeth: the “Dark Lord” at the end of his rope, furious, petty, wounded, and still dangerous. It immediately reminded me of the old Bullfrog game Dungeon Keeper, a delicious flip where the “heroes” are the invading problem and the dungeon is home.
And the larger setup is genuinely fun: a modern guy dropped into a fantasy world where the interface and progression rules are real. It’s a very “Last Starfighter” kind of promise: you thought this was a game; surprise, it’s your life now.
After that killer opening, though, the book slides into what I’d call comfort-food LitRPG. The system arrives, the protagonist learns the rules, experience turns into skills and spells, and the story moves forward in the familiar rhythm of upgrades and unlocks. None of this is bad—it’s the genre doing what the genre does—but it’s also where LitRPG can start to feel like it’s paying taxes to a dark, distant power. (Wait, maybe it is!)
In audiobook form, that tax is even more noticeable. You can’t skim a character sheet read-through the way you can on a page, so the moments that feel like UI or bookkeeping tend to slow the narrative down. That’s why Dungeon Lord reminded me so much of Neven Iliev’s Everybody Loves Large Chests: strong hook, a playful premise, and momentum driven by mechanics. If you’re in the mood for that, it delivers. If you’re hoping it will consistently rise into “great SF&F” rather than “great genre example,” it doesn’t quite get there. At least not in book one.
The obvious contrast is Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl. In Carl, the system isn’t just a rulebook, but the story engine: loot, upgrades, and achievements carry tone, character, and theme instead of functioning like a list of features. In Dungeon Lord, the mechanics are more straightforward: useful, functional, and sometimes a little too on-the-nose (occasionally even feeling like spoiler-adjacent spell names waiting to pay off). It’s trying to get there with the spells and skills, and there is some foreshadowing to be found. But it’s more obvious, not rooted as deeply in the lore, and adds little to the story.
Overall: I enjoyed it the way I enjoy Saturday morning cartoons: fun, energetic, and easy to keep going, even if I’m not itching to write an essay about the lore. I’m open to continuing the series later, because the premise has enough spark that I could see returning, especially if later books lean harder into the darker potential hinted at in that opening.
Audiobook note: another excellent Soundbooth Theater production, with Jeff Hays and Annie Ellicott doing what they do best. If you want a perfect sample of why that opening works so well out loud, Jeff Hays has a recording of it here: https://soundcloud.com/jeff-hays/dungeon-lord-by-hugo-huesca-chapter-1
