Last Save Dave

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Dave Deranger peaked in the nineties. He won the Nintendo World Championships, picked up an Olympic silver medal in boxing, and now spends his days unclogging toilets. Naturally, this makes him the ideal candidate to save Earth.

Last Save Dave follows a middle-aged plumber who is abducted by a minor deity and entered into an intergalactic competition where the winning champion saves their world and everyone else gets vaporised. Armed with a hefty pipe wrench and the ability to create save points and reload them after death, Dave quickly discovers that dying is going to be a fairly regular occurrence.

And he dies a lot.

The save-and-reload mechanic is the heart of the book and one of the things I enjoyed most, even if at this early stage it is a bit of cheat mechanic. It’s tempered in that he has limited uses, but it feels like he is never in any real danger. Every resurrection costs a talisman, so Dave is constantly balancing the temptation to spend resources on levelling up against keeping enough in reserve in case things go horribly wrong. Which they frequently do.

The setup has some obvious Mario inspiration running through it. A plumber to save the day, though instead of uppercuts and Goomba stampings, he’s swinging a wrench around. He’s got various powerups, multiple lives, and even a sort of plumber’s crack Spidey Sense that warns Dave when danger is nearby.

A lot of this first book is spent building foundations. Dave gradually learns how the competition works, gets to grips with his abilities, and starts assembling a team of fellow champions. Lyra, a cat-person competitor who will eventually become a rival, and Reggie, a lovable dog-person who immediately gets on her nerves, and a few others from different worlds.

That slower progression worked for me, though it does create the book’s biggest weakness. While there is a climactic battle towards the end, the story never quite feels finished. It feels more like the point where the author decided to stop rather than the natural end of a complete arc. Given the competition spans a thousand worlds on a gigantic world tree, there is clearly a lot more story still to come.

On the audiobook side, Garrett Michael Brown was an excellent choice. I enjoyed his work in Interstellar Gunrunner, and he was a perfect fit here as well. His slightly rough, working-class delivery suits Dave perfectly and helps sell the character from the very beginning. I noticed the occasional minor background noise during the recording, but nothing significant enough to distract from the performance.

Overall, this was a genuinely fun listen and a strong start to what looks like a very promising series. The ending felt a little undercooked, but the characters are easy to like, the save-point mechanics are interesting, and I finished the book wanting to jump straight into the next one. That is usually a good sign. I suspect this one will end up in my relisten rotation more than once.

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