Dungeon Crawler Carl

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Synopsis

It’s the most-watched game show in the galaxy!

In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth–from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds to all the trucks and cars–collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. 

The buildings and all the people inside, they’ve all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.

Only a few dare venture inside. But once you’re in, you can’t get out. And what’s worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it’s game over. In this game, it’s not about your strength or your dexterity. It’s about your views and your followers. It’s about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.

You can’t just survive here. You gotta survive big.

You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that “it” factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That’s the only way to truly survive in this game, with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy. 

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it’s anything but a game.

Synopsis source: The StoryGraph

Review

Genre(s): Science Fiction / Fantasy, Lit RPG
HB&W Rating: 3 stars
View on StoryGraph, Goodreads
Buy on Barnes & Noble, Amazon

This book has been everywhere lately, even my group chat with my besties. When they kept telling me I had to listen to the audio (which was fantastically done, by the way), I finally caved to the Audible trial so I could do just that. I’m not much of a gamer—I’ll leave that to my hubby—and Sci-Fi isn’t one of my favorite genres but I’ve found myself reading more and more of it recently, so with the cult following this book seems to have, I wanted to give it a go. All this to say, I had high expectations but with some concerns around the RPG aspect.

I appreciated the humor and the incredible world-building and I thought the author did a great job writing a literary RPG. It really struck me as Hunger Games x video games over and over again. The things that came from this author’s imagination are fascinating and so creative. I really liked Donut and Carl’s back-and-forth and watching their relationship grow. I liked the AI’s sarcasm and humor throughout.

This book did a lot of wonderful things, it just wasn’t for me. 

I couldn’t take the more serious parts seriously because too much was wrapped up in the sheer chaos of the RPG aspect. Even some of the times when we see Carl’s humanity peek through, it’s almost like we saw it fade again in the next breath due to the machinations of the dungeon. Even my hubby listened to part of this and couldn’t get into it and that man lives for video games. I guess I didn’t drink the koolaid on this one. I liked it but I likely won’t read any more in the series.

Until next time,

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