The long-expected novel of hit manhwa Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint finally hits the bookshops in July 2025, as Ize Press is bringing the English translation in volume format to the West. The series started as a serialised novel and quickly gained popularity when adapted as a manhwa (available on webcomics platform Webtoon).

Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint narrates the story of office worker Dokja Kim, who likes spending his time reading web novels. He’s just an ordinary man with an ordinary, if not boring, life who suddenly gets the chance to become a character in his favourite novel, Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse. Everything seems fine on his commute home on the tube, until fantasy turns into reality.

A goblin appears in his tube carriage and gives the passengers a scenario (aka mission) if they want to survive: kill another person within the time limit. It doesn’t take long for the passengers to realise it’s neither a joke nor a prank, but they need to fulfil the scenario if they care about their own lives. Mostly everyone is scared out of their mind, but not Dokja. In fact, he recognises the event as the start of the novel. But how could it be possible? He doesn’t know yet, but he needs to play along with the goblin’s demands if he wants a chance to figure it out, and of course, make it out alive.

Luckily, as he’s been an avid reader of the novel and the only fan who stuck it out till the end, he knows that will happen and how he can take advantage of the situation while also meeting his favourite characters in the novel.

The first time I heard about this series, it was in relation to the manhwa, and I decided to give it a try. I became slightly obsessed thanks to its gripping action, clever plot development and compelling narration, so I couldn’t not give the novel a try, even if I didn’t know what to expect exactly (I’ve been burned by light novels in the past). But thankfully it didn’t disappoint.

People can start this series with either the manhwa or the light novel as they both give enough descriptions and background to show what’s going on. The difference of starting with the manhwa though is that the readers can get a visual representation of the story when reading the book, as they know what the characters and monsters look like, which is something that sometimes it’s harder to picture with just words. There are also some minor differences in words, e.g. goblin vs dokkaebi, even if they mean the same thing.

The book covers the first 25 chapters of the webnovel, and the readers are introduced to quite a few characters who will be essential in the further development of the story. Let’s start by Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse‘s protagonist, Junghyeok Yu, who cannot really be considered a hero… but more like an antihero. He’s as dangerous as the goblin, if not more so. In fact, he’s a regressor who has gone through the same life a few times, trying to make a change. This world is run almost like a reality TV show, just more bloody and violent. The presenters are goblins, and the viewers are constellations—beings who live outside the Earth, and who can sponsor humans by granting them power. The more regressions Junghyeok goes through, the more jaded he becomes, so it’s no surprise when his meeting with Dokja doesn’t go that well.

Hyeonseong is a secondary character, who is supposed to become Junghyeok’s teammate, but Dokja gets to him first. He’s a military man with strong physical attributes (aka super strength). Huiwon and Gilyeong are somehow new characters: they weren’t present in the original story, or if they were, they weren’t even mentioned, but thanks to Dokja’s special ability ‘Character Profile’ that allows him to see a person’s attributes like a video game pop-up window, he realises their true potential and allows them to join his entourage as well. The most surprising is Sangah, Dokja’s coworker who is not a character of the novel. What does that mean? There is still a lot we don’t know, but the author singNsong drops hints here and there to let the reader get a better understanding of what’s going on, but there is still a long way to go before we can figure out why and how reality and fantasy merged.

The layout of the novel reflects the video game style that the story and manwha describe: pop-up windows, messages resembling a forum chat, and even the nicknames of the constellations. I appreciate how the publisher kept this style in the print book, and how it’s differentiated through the use of different fonts whether the speaker is human or the goblin. The only downside of keeping this videogame-style narration, which is more manhwa-like, is that sometimes the change in scene is abrupt and thus the reading flow gets interrupted.

The novel of Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint Volume 1 turns the 25 chapters of the webnovel into six chapters, or episodes, each with their own sub-episodes. The series is written by singNsong with translation by Hye Young Im and J. Torres, and Ize Press publishes the novel and manhwa in volume format in the English language. The series is also being adapted into an anime with no release date announced yet, and the live action is due to release in South Korea this month. Volume 2 of the novel is scheduled for November.

We received an ARC for reviewing purposes from Ize Press.