The apocalypse will be televised!
A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.
The buildings and all the people inside have 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 followers, your views. Your clout. 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.
A fun book that I'm sure fans of GameLit/LitRPG will enjoy. There are some standout moments that help to elevate "Dungeon Crawler Carl" a bit above what's typical of those genres but there are also some weaker elements that for me prevented it from being an ideal reading experience. Those mostly boil down to issues of inconsistency or a lack of polish and refinement in certain aspects of the storytelling that I occasionally found distracting and detrimental to the narrative's overall quality. It's also rather long, given the scope of the story, which is effectively only the "tutorial" for a much longer tale that spans many more volumes. Thus, even after well over 400 pages, there's no real sense of closure or any stakes beyond the constant life-or-death perils experienced by the protagonists, who, as one might expect, often wear even more plot armor than "loot" obtained throughout the "levels" they traverse.
Still, "Dungeon Crawler Carl" is a generally solid and satisfying read, and a great potential starting point for those interested in dipping a toe into the GameLit/LitRPG world. I'm giving it a 4.25, rounded up so as not to underrate it.
For a Dungeons and Dragons fan, this book was an easy read. There were many elements in this book that took me back to times playing D&D around a table and laughing at the shenanigans and awing at the creative ways to solve puzzles and beat foes.
There are something that could be better about the book, and the series.
But overall, it held up to my expectations and then some.
GOD DAMN IT DONUT!