Should you read Dungeon Crawler Carl?
What works
I loved Carl’s practical response to danger and Donut’s conviction that she’s the most important person in the room. Put them together and a fight can be hilarious right up to the moment it becomes frightening.
What may not work for you
During some fights I wanted the action to carry on before the dungeon AI weighed in again. The achievements are often funny, but inventories, stat changes, and notifications can pile up at exactly the moment I want to know what happens next.
What Dungeon Crawler Carl is about
Carl is outside in his underwear with his ex-girlfriend’s prizewinning cat when the buildings around him collapse. The aliens responsible have turned Earth into the set of a reality show. Carl and Princess Donut enter a dungeon where survivors earn levels, pick up loot, and fight their way to the next floor while viewers across the galaxy watch.
Carl and Princess Donut make the book
Donut starts out as a pampered show cat and takes to being able to talk with the confidence of someone who has always had a great deal to say. She’s opinionated, funny, and increasingly dangerous. Carl is usually thinking about the next thing that might kill them. I loved how those instincts rub against each other, especially because you can believe they’d still look out for each other when the jokes stop.
Carl has to work with what the dungeon gives him. I liked watching him figure out how an item or a rule could do something the game’s designers hadn’t intended. Sometimes that takes an inventive use of explosives. He survives because he keeps thinking under pressure, and there’s enough room for a plan to go wrong that I wanted to see him try it.
When the game show gets dark
The people running the show can make a threat look like a joke simply by announcing it with enough enthusiasm. I found that funny and increasingly ugly. The dungeon’s rewards give Carl real reasons to learn the rules, while the audience has reasons to enjoy watching people suffer under them. The more I cared about Carl and Donut, the harder it was to laugh off what the show was asking them to do.
Can you start here if you’ve never read LitRPG?
Yes. LitRPG puts role-playing game mechanics inside the story. Here Carl has to learn what the skills, equipment, and levels mean as he goes, so you can pick up the rules with him even if you’ve never played an RPG. I had the most fun with the mechanics when a rule gave him an idea he could use in the middle of trouble. The longer stretches of stat and inventory updates were where I felt the pace slow.
How the ending feels and where the series goes
I found the last stretch exhilarating. The immediate dungeon challenge gets a satisfying climax, and by the end I wanted to know what Carl and Donut would be asked to do next.
Having read all eight published novels, I think the first almost feels like a tutorial compared with what comes next. The politics outside the dungeon grow more complicated, and the consequences of the show get crueler and more personal. I think the series gets stronger as it makes room for both. My Dungeon Crawler Carl reading order explains how the eight books fit together.
I’d keep book one at 4.5 out of 5. The interruptions sometimes took me out of a fight, but Carl’s improvisation and his partnership with Donut kept drawing me back in. I’ve also put together nine books like Dungeon Crawler Carl for readers who want more of the humor, the progression, or the fight against a rigged system.
Make the next decision