The apocalypse will be televised! Welcome to the first book in the wildly popular and addictive Dungeon Crawler Carl series—now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.
You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.
Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.
Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.
Before finishing the book:
Unlike a lot of people reading this book that I’ve scene, this ain’t my first rodeo in the LitRPG space. Just flick through my shit and you’ll see I read a SHITLOAD of isekai/dungeon crawler stuff. My favorite, hands down? Solo Leveling. A lot of it is old hat to me, and so a lot of it feels more… trope-y to me.
As of writing this, I’m almost done with the first book. I’m walking a tightrope of “loved it” and “liked it well enough”, being firmly in the demographic that this book is aimed at. It feels exactly like sitting around a table with a bunch of my friends and playing Jackbox or playing with our joke characters and promising not to get too deep but one guy is starting to get a bit deep with his character and then to remind the guy that this is all jokes and yuk-yuks, we throw in MLM fairies that you have to put in a blender after making him kill a bunch of babies to make him feel bad.
This is like playing with the world’s pissiest DM who thinks he’s really funny but comes off as really mean a lot of the time. A lot of the fun factor of playing TTRPGs is getting creative with what you got, and writing the RPG itself lets you do whatever the hell you want, so that’s what Matt Dinniman is doing. He’s his own sick DM.
You know what this reminds me of? 2000’s internet, back when the internet was a little bit weirder.
After finishing the book:
Yeah, I’m still gonna read the rest of the books as long as they entertain me, but at what cost?
There’s a lot in the book, but right now it’s all entertainment, and we’re watching a world where cruelty and kindness are weighed the same. The characters don’t necessarily have arcs, per se, but challenges that have them constantly pounding back things to get those gains. Where’s what I wrote in my other blog? Whatever, I’ll just link it.
It doesn’t feel like there is a proper rest between things. No time for things to really wash over you. There’s safe rooms, but it’s always structured like so:
brief story -> THREAT -> preparation -> LARGE MOVEMENT -> preparation
Example:
Carl steps into the dungeon -> GOBLINS! -> duck into tutorial guild and spend like an hour or two getting ready to fight goblins -> FIGHT GOBLINS -> return to tutorial room
move elderly to safe room -> RAGE ELEMENTAL!!-> build MOAB -> DEPLOY MOAB!! -> go to safe room
It’s like a pulse. Up down up down up down. The thing is, it’s set up episodically, so one can imagine that the audience in the book is getting the ideal set up of an exposition, an inciting incident, a rising action, an exciting climax, the falling action, and the resolution. Us, the readers and the crawlers, experience is as a mixed bag.
I wonder how this will change looking at it as a whole, because the pulse will not be something that will be able to keep people going forever. If this is going to follow a Hero’s Journey structure, I’d call this the call to adventure and refusal of the call section… but I’d wager it’s more of a Save the Cat structure that’ll probably eventually be adapted (poorly) onto the big screen.
We have to get to know Carl through tension and reaction— there’s scarcely a past Carl, there’s only a Carl who we are watching getting put together in front of us. The same goes for Donut. Donut’s being comes together in the dungeon the moment she becomes sapient in the dungeon, and she feels like she has a more substantial backstory than Carl does through their shared history.
I can’t say I hold this book in as high regard as others do, not yet, but I’ll be reading more and my opinion is open to change over time.
