This novel definitely doesn't deserve the 1 ratings, but it has issues that made me personally drop it.

The biggest problem is really the difference between expectation and reality: From the description and early story chapters, I expected them to condemn the players who were criminals or even terrorists, but they really only care that the person is a player. Not my cup of tea but it's similar to sci-fi stories with body snatchers or parasites and protagonists trying to root out the invaders. I could see people enjoying it.

The "harem"... more>> is just... the other inquisitors involved are all beautiful women and they trauma bonded with the protagonist, so they're friendly. I'm 100% sure at this point harem and rom-com aren't important to the plot, they're just comrades (fanatics) with the same goal. The author could change his mind, of course...

The interactions, world-building, and plot are decently well-written, but... the main characters being fanatics and torturing and killing people who haven't done anything wrong just because they're immigrants (not even of their choice, they were forcibly brought over!) really leaves a bad taste in my mouth at this current point in time for some reason. <<less

... Well, our protagonist and co are homicidal cultists in service to a (female?) God of Darkness who had a breakup with their Goddess of Light partner and stuff happened, so the Goddess started isekaing people people via possession and quest giving.

Before I go on, note that if I seem to focus this review on moral judging a bit, it's because there's very little else of note to this story, pretty much everything else is boring and not worth comment.

This Cult (capitalization present in story), MC included, believe that since... more>> the soul of someone isekai'd into cannot normally be recovered, a Player has in fact (knowingly or not) mu*dered the person they take over and are Outsiders who also broken some supposed natural order by crossing realms or something.

And what is to be done with all of "the possessed"? TORTURE AND KILL THEM OF COURSE!

While some of them are jerks or bad people, the protagonist and the Cult he serves will mutilate, torture, and kill even Players that genuinely did nothing wrong and had no bad intentions on screen, it explicitly doesn't matter to them for by simply isekaing (which is involuntary on their part) they have committed a crime that must be met with death. As the other reviewer mentioned, it's like they're treated like alien bodysnatchers that need to be culled.

Note despite calling themselves the Inquisition, they're actually an illegal organization; I'd be so blunt as to call our "heroes" including the protagonist as more akin to a group of religious serial killers.

There is some intrigue in that the Goddess is aiming for something with the people she has selected to be possessed and the Quests they're given, our protagonist and his fellow Cult members aiming to discover this conspiracy... by capturing and torturing the information out of them. (The Players themselves have no idea of course.)

Most of the story so far is pretty much them hunting for a Player, getting them alone/capturing them after a fight, then torturing and killing them followed by talk of "What dastardly conspiracy is the Goddess plotting!" and trying to figure out who the Players are. Morality aside, while the writing has promise and some talent in it it just doesn't grab me, past what's going it's missing something I can't describe.

So, the ideas do have some promise; isekai is a genre that could use some more, while not perhaps the pretentious term "deconstruction", examination of its many, many clichés and default assumptions. I'm not going literary nut here, I'm saying this from a reader's enjoyment perspective where I think such twists and examinations can make for good storytelling, particularly in a supergenre that has mostly devolved into a bizarre game of remixing cliché formulas. However, what we have here is something far more suited to an antagonist faction than the protagonists.

Let me be blunt. I actually often enjoy villain protagonists, yet I really don't like this guy.

The protagonist is evil. The heroines are too. Not one of them questions a thing about what they're doing. Worse, they're uninteresting and don't really have much to stick out past being mu*derous zealots that zigzag between being normal and being fanatical, self-righteous serial killers.

I can't stress this enough, they torture and kill ANY Player.

Players killed the main heroine's family, and we're told the quests the Goddess gives them usually cause chaos. Okay, let's given an example of how they go about this.

The first Player we see die on-screen is a dude who swindled and manipulated some other adventurers and put a bunch into debt and got a woman pregnant than ran off; okay he's a piece of garbage and I can understand one feeling either way whether he deserves death or not, and also one not having issue with him dying horribly; though I do have to ask why they're not meting death to every deadbeat out ther- oh yeah, because he's a Player and thus it's okay, all the other manipulative deadbeats aren't worthy of death I guess then. That's what it's actually about, he's a Player and must die. He's not only a bad person, he's a hijacker from another realm serving as an unwitting enemy agent of a (supposedly) bad Goddess of Light?

Then later on, the protagonist tortures and eventually kills a Player who's just a student who literally hadn't done anything wrong. The torture being to extract information on his quest and such, MC promising that he won't kill the Player if he cooperates. He cooperates and... well, do you expect people calling themselves Inquisitors to actually keep their word? Of course MC f*cking kills the guy.

I guess... the whole thing feels framed as if they're not doing anything wrong, and while I can't truly profess to know what the author thinks (contrary to recent thought among foolish circles, authors can in fact intentionally write works they themselves don't agree with), with nothing from either the characters or narration really indicating so much as a shred of doubt (either in-character, or via the narrative) the story feels certainly as if they're perfectly in the right, not even in a "doing what I have to" way. I'm not that opposed to stories about monstrous protagonists as long as they grip me; but they often make it clear to some extent that you know, they're messed up... and arguably worse, the story fails to grab me.

The end result is that the MC and the heroines (no, they are no better than him) make my skin crawl more than even any 40k Inquisitor.

Maybe that'll change later on, it's relatively early for these sorts of novels. A great twist would of course be MC turning out to himself be a Player all along, but I'm not confident that'll happen or it'll be adequately done if so.

Currently though?

I'm sorry, but what we're left with is a story about a serial killer. <<less