Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; when the Coliseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world. Let’s gear up for Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman.
Synopsis:
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.
Source: Goodreads
SPOILERS BELOW
In Dungeon Crawler Carl, Earth is taken over by an alien corporation that turns it into a galactically televised gameshow. The human population is forced to run through a D&D-style fantasy dungeon full of monsters and traps, aided by a stat system that grant them superhuman abilities and “magic” items that boost their capabilities, all overseen by an omniscient AI designed to tweak the enemy encounters and loot drops for maximum entertainment value. If a dungeon crawler can make it through all 18 levels, they’ll win back the planet – too bad nobody in galactic history has ever gotten farther than level 13.
This book belongs to a genre called LitRPG, which faithfully reproduces roleplaying game conventions like stats, random encounters, treasure drops, and so on (with varying amounts of in-universe justification, depending on the series). It’s not a very well-respected genre due to the large number of low-quality isekai power fantasies clogging it up; but as you might guess if you read my reviews of the So I’m a Spider, So What? series, I’m an absolute sucker for it if executed well. And Dungeon Crawler Carl is executed very, very well.
There are a number of ingredients to the magic formula that makes it such a success. Top of the list, of course, would be the characters. Hapless crawler Carl and his pampered feline companion Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk make the perfect odd couple bickering buddy duo; and whether getting into outrageous death-defying antics in the dungeon or bantering with talk show hosts in the between-floor interviews, I just can’t get enough of them. Then there’s the mixture of action and comedy: the book delivers not only spellbinding fight sequences against the monsters of the dungeon, but also excellent humor in the form of the achievements and item descriptions our heroes encounter. And, yes, there’s of course that Pavlovian number-go-up good feeling that Skinner Box games make so effectively exploit and which the best LitRPGs find a way to make work in non-interactive text form: seeing what skills our protagonists acquire and how they make use of them, what off-the-wall exploits they can come up with to overcome foes with bigger numbers.
Another thing the book has going for it is the setting. While we only get a few brief glimpses behind the scenes in this first novel, it’s clear that this is not one of those low-effort LitRPGs that use the default RPG setting because they expect the audience to be familiar with it and put no further thought into things. There are powerful political and economic machinations at play behind the game: an ultranationalist faction takeover in the government of the race running the show. A corporation on the edge of bankruptcy counting on profits from the show to bail them out, while creditors loom ominously over their shoulders. Former dungeon crawlers from other worlds who bought their way into the system to stay alive, and rich alien assholes who use the game to play out their power fantasies. All these different factions with differing incentives on whether they want the game to wrap up quick or drag on long, have a higher lethality or see more competitors get farther, which contestants they can sponsor to make them a profit or embarrass their rivals. And caught in the middle of it all, the crawlers trying to navigate the web of these competing alien interests and figure out the best strategy to become popular with viewers and profitable to corporate sponsors so that they’ll be more valuable alive than dead; anything to make the AI running the show decide to skew the RNG in their favor and give them the slightest bit better of a chance of surviving to the next level.
Finally, I need to mention the exclusive bonus story “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret” included in the print edition of this volume, which features a bunch of minor goblin minions fed up with their role as disposable trash mobs for the crawlers to slaughter staging a rebellion against their corporate overlords, assisted by the sympathetic AI. This is a compelling premise that could easily sustain an entire series on its own, and made for an excellent coda to the book.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is truly exceptional. I am more enthusiastic about this story than I can recall being for a series in a long time, and plan to dive into the remaining installments right away.
Final Rating: 5/5
