Just saw In Another World With My Smartphone...

[Tvtyrant]

It would be fun to write a reverse isekai. The character appears in the video game world and is constantly beset by horrors they can't deal with, bonding with NPCs and then watching them die to quick time events. Maybe even have the main character be an NPC instead of a PC, and struggling to figure out how to survive and protect their new friends in a world where they are weaker then goblins and can't level. They build increasingly elaborate traps and fortifications to hold off bad guys, invest heavily in gunpowder, demon summoning and undead to protect themselves and are finally killed by the heroes because they are clearly the "villain."

Edit Expansion: So to go full reverse, the main character is a jock type (those still exist right?) who has a younger brother who is a classic shut in. The younger brother Robert is a gaming fanatic who rarely leaves his room and gets bullied at school, while main character Jordan has a girlfriend, is in drama and some B rank sport like lacross (no need to be totally cliche.)

Robert purchases a new game system at the start of the summer break and tells everyone to not disturb him for the summer. Jordan becomes worried after not seeing Robert come out even to use the restroom for weeks. He goes into his brother's room and finds a swirling vortex where the screen on the TV should be. He falls in/goes in/whatever and is dumped into the RPG.

Robert is no where to be seen, and Jordan wakes up in a small village full of normal village folks. He walks around in a daze, trying to figure out what is going on until the village is destroyed by a goblin attack. His last sight before he is killed by a goblin riding a giant spider is his brother in a hero costume (probably a wizard type?) killing goblins.

After dying Jordan wakes up in his bed in the same village. All of the villagers are aware of what happened, it happens every night without fail. Jordan then groundhogs days his way through a large number of attempts to stop the attacks, during which other heroes show up but his brother does not return. The groundhogs day effects the villagers but not the heroes.

Even if Jordan leaves the village he is teleported back to his bed the next morning. He discovers the location of the portal home but cannot get to it before the day resets, and when he talks to the heroes a box of writing appears over his head and they cannot hear his voice. He finds out from reading hero text conversations that the beta ends at the end of summer, and he has only a month left to escape or he will be deleted when they reset the servers.

The big trick Jordan discovers is that player characters can't injure good NPCs, and if the villains win there is an escalating series of raids towards the capital where the spawn/portal is. So he convinces the NPCs to assist the goblins by pinning down heroes thst the goblins finish off. He forges an army to take the capital, telling villains and NPCs that if they seize the spawn point it will break the cycle and they can live normal lives.

He discovers the server is also a hardcore PVP server so every battle is to his advantage.

Everywhere the combination of indestructible good NPCs and villains succeed and players become pissed a the "glitch." The programmers remove the restriction and make all NPCs villains as well as turning off their spawns, and resurrects all PCs with PVP turned off. Jordan launches the combined army of undead, goblins and demon worshippers at the capital where all of the heroes are. During the battle he hides in a cellar until the fighting ends, then walks past the corpses of heroes and villains and uses the portal to leave.