Dungeon Crawler Carl: A LitRPG/Gamelit Adventure Paperback – September 21, 2020

A Coast Guard veteran and all around good guy, Carl, lives in an apartment with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. On a cold, winter night, Donut slips out of a window and gets stuck up a tree. And it’s a good thing she does! Wearing nothing but a jacket, boxers, and a pair of slippers that don’t fit, Carl goes outside to try to coax her down. He’s just about retrieved the cat, and then it happens.The whole world is changed. In the blink of an eye, every building, car, and piece of technology on the planet is flattened. Smooshed. Gone. A bodiless voice announces that anyone who doesn’t want to live off whatever is left on the planet will need to enter stairs. Carl and the cat do so, and that’s when the fun starts.It seems the galaxy has had a long-running and massively popular television program that follows “dungeon crawls”—classic role-playing/video game scenarios where adventurers go into a medieval dungeon, explore, fight monsters, win treasure, gain experience, become more powerful, and then proceed to deeper, harder levels. Earth has been selected to serve as the setting for the current season. That’s right. The Earth has been destroyed for the sake of a galactic television game. By entering the stairwell, Carl, Donut, and a couple million other humans have become participants in this game. Instead of remaining a pet, Donut is made into a fellow “crawler,” like Carl. She can speak, and reason, and fight—all with the personality one would expect from a cat named Princess DonutThe rules to this galactically televised dungeon crawl are intricate. But essentially, Carl and Donut begin to mentally see stat screens, just like in an RPG video game: health, various skills, their strength, dexterity, intelligence, and constitution. In classic 80’s kids Dungeons & Dragons style, they have unlimited encumbrance, meaning they can carry anything they can pick up, file it away in “inventory,” and pull it up whenever needed. They‘re on level 1 of this season’s crawl, a classic dungeon with tunnels, doors, chambers, and monsters—lots of different monsters. There’s a countdown running, so they only have so many days to find a set of stairs that will lead them down to the next, harder level. And if they don’t find the stairs before the timer runs out, the level they’re on will collapse. There’s all sorts of lethal dangers awaiting the crawlers. And that’s what takes up the bulk of the book.There are daring encounters, puzzles to sort through, and lots and lots of monsters to fight. In each encounter, the reader is given real time stats of the characters. After their initial shock, Carl and Donut slowly form an endearing partnership, one that proves quite successful in this dangerous game they‘re forced to play.I’ll confess for the first quarter of the book, I was skeptical. It felt an awful lot like one of my kids watching someone else playing a video game (which is something I don’t really understand). But Matt Dinniman does a masterful job of weaving in enough subplots—both inside and outside the dungeon—so that both a cohesive story and genuine character development emerge from all the excitement of fighting kobolds, or rigging goblin explosives, or figuring out how to slay a “big boss” monster that vaguely resembles a cat-hoarding old lady. There’s depth to this dungeon.And of course there’s action. It’s compelling, page-turning, fun. And funny. Dinniman has a sharp, occasionally crass, often dark sense of humor and he knows how to use it in all the right places. There’s snark, and absurdity, and physical comedy, and some snort-through-your nostrils lines. Think of a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign melded with a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy vibe that‘s centered around a likable hero and a hilariously self-absorbed cat.I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will definitely be pursuing the series. Highly recommended.

I Loved this book. It was hilarious and gave me the laughs that I needed during a stressful time. Carl gave me Harry Dresden vibes. 4.5 Rounded upCharacters: 5/5 - The characters in this book was so so good. They were fictional, even fantastical (a talking cat named Princess Donut??) but also incredibly relatable. Weirdly enough they kept having me ask myself “What would you do in this situation?” Mordecai was the best guide for Carl and Donut. Loved him, can’t wait to read more.Atmosphere/Setting: 5/5 - I loved the atmosphere and settings here. With LitRPG books, I’m never sure when I start them if we’re going to get just 1 level or the whole game or how it will play out. I’m glad that we got a few levels at least - and while they were similar, they also had distinctive differences.Writing Style: 5/5 - Loved Dinniman’s writing style in this book. It was easy to follow with great pacing. Funny yet also made you think. It was just the right amount of ridiculousness.Plot: 5/5 - At the bottom line, the plot was about Carl and Princess Donut’s survival. However, Dinniman also injected social commentary through gameplay. I thought it was brilliant.Intrigue: 4.5/5 - As much as I loved this book and its characters, there were (just a few) times when my brain did zone out a bit. That was probably a me thing - it’s been a long stressful year so far (I know, it’s only March!) but I had to note that here. Additional note to my note, although my brain zoned out and wandered a few times, I was never confused when it came back.Logic: 5/5 - The way that Dinniman used the LitRPG model and Carl (and Donut) learning the game as they are “playing” it - helped the reader along amazingly. We learned along with the characters, but not in an academia … lecturey sort of way. It felt natural, and helped everything make logical sense.Enjoyment: 5/5 - I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can’t wait to read more in this series, which I am now drastically behind on.Audiobook Narrator: 5/5 Jeff Hayes did an AMAZING job at narrating this audiobook. I don’t know how he managed to do it but he gave different voices for all the characters - and there are a lot. And never got them mixed up. His pacing in his reading was great and easy to follow, and I could probably have read this book just through the audio alone.Total = 39.5/8 = 4.9

Dungeon Crawler Carl is the story of a man and his cat just trying to survive the apocalypse. After getting stuck outside in his boxers and a leather jacket, Carl and his girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, are thrust into the World Dungeon - an intergalactic game show that they stand a very high likelihood of getting killed in. Carl and Princess Donut must level up and go from floor to floor in the dungeon defeating bosses and earning experience points and loot boxes so they can keep fighting their way through in order to survive.This book was fun! I really didn't know what to expect out of a litrpg novel but I actually enjoyed this so much more than I thought I was going to. I've never played dungeons and dragons before but I felt like the basics were pretty well explained as you go and I never got to a point where I felt like I was lost or confused. The book was silly, decently written and had a lot of heart. The characters are all enjoyable and I actually found myself excited to pick it back up so I could find out what everyone was going to get up to next.I'll definitely be continuing on with this series.