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inverarityAn ordinary dude needs to level up in a post-apocalyptic dungeon... with his ex's goddamn cat.
Dandy House, 2020, 446 pages
Litrpg has recently become a very popular subgenre. It's the ultimate pop culture recursion: novels based on characters from games that were mostly based on other media. In LitRPG, the characters are literally RPG characters, often with stat blocks included in the text. Fans love watching numbers go up and the characters gaining new powers and abilities; I have found most of them to be quite flat and poorly written. The idea of a character pausing after each scene to check his hit points and mana level is just kind of ridiculous to me, though this is apparently crack to some readers.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is probably the most popular series in the genre, having broken into the mainstream and supposedly with a TV show in production. So I decided to give it a shot.
The premise is a zany blend of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battle Royale, and Dungeons & Dragons. Aliens arrive on Earth and declare that Earth has just been acquired and will be processed for raw materials. Everyone under a roof — in any kind of building or vehicle — will die unless they take one of the nearest entrances into a mega-dungeon. It's literally a mega-dungeon, populated with monsters, traps, treasures, and gimmicks straight out of an RPG. Everyone who enters the dungeon becomes a "Crawler." Their stats are tracked, they are given weapons, special abilities, loot boxes, and a mission: to progress down into ever lower and more difficult levels. Each level will collapse after a preset time limit, killing anyone who hasn't found an exit to the next level down.
Carl is just an ordinary guy, an ex-Coast Guardsman who's slacking in his apartment with his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, when the aliens arrive and announce the end of the world. In a series of unlikely events, Carl ends up entering the dungeon, with Donut, but without pants. And the fun begins. Early in the book, Carl receives a random magic item that turns Princess Donut sentient. She becomes Princess Donut Best in Dungeon, and she and Carl form a party.
Donut was a slick move on the author's part. He had to know a sassy talking cat who casts fucking Magic Missile would be a hit. She's obviously meant to be a fan favorite (which means she's got tons of plot armor, so you can forget about the cat dying), and she's actually written pretty well as... well, a cat. A sentient, talking cat. Whose stats are greater than Carl's by far. But who still has the mentality of a newly-sapient toddler who was raised on TV soap operas and watching Carl and his girlfriend fuck. His ex-girlfriend, Beatrice, who was apparently a pretty horrible person (he was already breaking up with her because he found out she cheated on him, and then Donut lets drop that apparently she was pretty much the town bike) and whom I strongly suspect is going to turn up in a later book still alive despite 99% of Earth's population being dead.
As far as the premise, the author has gone to some lengths to justify how and why things work the way they do. (Short answer: nanotechnology, at the level of "indistinguishable from magic.") The dungeon is a gigantic gladiatorial arena being broadcast to the entire galaxy, and Carl and Donut not only have to survive and level up, they also have to attract viewers and sponsors, and that means not just surviving but doing it with style. The author was clearly inspired by everything from D&D to Hunger Games to The Running Man. It also turns out that there is a lot of intergalactic politics going on behind the scenes, and I expect this will play a larger part in future volumes. We get some more-or-less passable explanations for why a mega-dungeon, why creatures created by aliens resemble monsters from Earth folklore and tabletop RPGs, and why the monsters, the mentors, and the AI that runs the dungeon are all so familiar with Earth (but really, Western) pop culture.
While this still requires suspending your disbelief, a lot, the infodumps where their mentor explains the rules and how to do things are mostly interesting and well-timed.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is funny and mostly meant to be funny. (A lot of the humor is really crude and gross.) But it's also low-key horrific as well. 99% of Earth's population dies without ever entering the dungeon, and the survivors are dramatically winnowed down with each level. They are forced to fight monsters who are actually aliens from other planets, being forced to play the role of mooks and who don't want to be there any more than the crawlers do. And to have a chance of getting the viewers, sponsors, and loot boxes that will keep them alive, they have to ham it up for an audience of trillions of aliens who think it's entertaining to watch this. Being disagreeable and giving their viewers the finger, literally or figuratively, gets punished. So as funny and ridiculous as the situations are, Carl never loses sight of just how awful this is, that it's really not funny and not entertaining to the crawlers being forced to LARP for their lives, almost all of whom are doomed to die horribly.
As far as the mechanics go, the "stats" segments are mostly not too intrusive (I found the infinite inventory system where each crawler can carry around literally tons of items for instantaneous retrieval the hardest to swallow), and the battles are mostly meaningful and interesting, though there's a lot of "Carl and Donut run around killing low-level mobs to gain XP" interludes. The author has done a lot of work with his worldbuilding and plotting, doing his best to make an inherently silly premise believable, and he's dropped plenty of plot macguffins and hints of a metaplot. I liked Carl, and even that damned cat.
So this book is actually really pretty entertaining. The story moves at a fast pace, the characters (even the "NPCs") are consistently interesting, and while the writing won't win any literary awards, it's not bad. Like a lot of litrpg novels, Dungeon Crawler Carl got its start on Royal Road, but Dinniman is one of the rare authors who can write well enough to launch his books into a full-time writing gig.
However... this series is up to seven books now. I don't know where the series goes, but if it's six more books of Carl and Princess Donut fighting through dungeon levels while Carl gripes about how much he hates their alien overlords, well, I don't know if it can hold my attention that long. I would be interested in knowing if the metaplot advances and if Carl is somehow going to become involved in a galactic rebellion.
I'm certainly going to at least check out the next book.
My complete list of book reviews.
Dandy House, 2020, 446 pages
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.
Litrpg has recently become a very popular subgenre. It's the ultimate pop culture recursion: novels based on characters from games that were mostly based on other media. In LitRPG, the characters are literally RPG characters, often with stat blocks included in the text. Fans love watching numbers go up and the characters gaining new powers and abilities; I have found most of them to be quite flat and poorly written. The idea of a character pausing after each scene to check his hit points and mana level is just kind of ridiculous to me, though this is apparently crack to some readers.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is probably the most popular series in the genre, having broken into the mainstream and supposedly with a TV show in production. So I decided to give it a shot.
The premise is a zany blend of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battle Royale, and Dungeons & Dragons. Aliens arrive on Earth and declare that Earth has just been acquired and will be processed for raw materials. Everyone under a roof — in any kind of building or vehicle — will die unless they take one of the nearest entrances into a mega-dungeon. It's literally a mega-dungeon, populated with monsters, traps, treasures, and gimmicks straight out of an RPG. Everyone who enters the dungeon becomes a "Crawler." Their stats are tracked, they are given weapons, special abilities, loot boxes, and a mission: to progress down into ever lower and more difficult levels. Each level will collapse after a preset time limit, killing anyone who hasn't found an exit to the next level down.
Carl is just an ordinary guy, an ex-Coast Guardsman who's slacking in his apartment with his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, when the aliens arrive and announce the end of the world. In a series of unlikely events, Carl ends up entering the dungeon, with Donut, but without pants. And the fun begins. Early in the book, Carl receives a random magic item that turns Princess Donut sentient. She becomes Princess Donut Best in Dungeon, and she and Carl form a party.
Donut was a slick move on the author's part. He had to know a sassy talking cat who casts fucking Magic Missile would be a hit. She's obviously meant to be a fan favorite (which means she's got tons of plot armor, so you can forget about the cat dying), and she's actually written pretty well as... well, a cat. A sentient, talking cat. Whose stats are greater than Carl's by far. But who still has the mentality of a newly-sapient toddler who was raised on TV soap operas and watching Carl and his girlfriend fuck. His ex-girlfriend, Beatrice, who was apparently a pretty horrible person (he was already breaking up with her because he found out she cheated on him, and then Donut lets drop that apparently she was pretty much the town bike) and whom I strongly suspect is going to turn up in a later book still alive despite 99% of Earth's population being dead.
As far as the premise, the author has gone to some lengths to justify how and why things work the way they do. (Short answer: nanotechnology, at the level of "indistinguishable from magic.") The dungeon is a gigantic gladiatorial arena being broadcast to the entire galaxy, and Carl and Donut not only have to survive and level up, they also have to attract viewers and sponsors, and that means not just surviving but doing it with style. The author was clearly inspired by everything from D&D to Hunger Games to The Running Man. It also turns out that there is a lot of intergalactic politics going on behind the scenes, and I expect this will play a larger part in future volumes. We get some more-or-less passable explanations for why a mega-dungeon, why creatures created by aliens resemble monsters from Earth folklore and tabletop RPGs, and why the monsters, the mentors, and the AI that runs the dungeon are all so familiar with Earth (but really, Western) pop culture.
While this still requires suspending your disbelief, a lot, the infodumps where their mentor explains the rules and how to do things are mostly interesting and well-timed.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is funny and mostly meant to be funny. (A lot of the humor is really crude and gross.) But it's also low-key horrific as well. 99% of Earth's population dies without ever entering the dungeon, and the survivors are dramatically winnowed down with each level. They are forced to fight monsters who are actually aliens from other planets, being forced to play the role of mooks and who don't want to be there any more than the crawlers do. And to have a chance of getting the viewers, sponsors, and loot boxes that will keep them alive, they have to ham it up for an audience of trillions of aliens who think it's entertaining to watch this. Being disagreeable and giving their viewers the finger, literally or figuratively, gets punished. So as funny and ridiculous as the situations are, Carl never loses sight of just how awful this is, that it's really not funny and not entertaining to the crawlers being forced to LARP for their lives, almost all of whom are doomed to die horribly.
As far as the mechanics go, the "stats" segments are mostly not too intrusive (I found the infinite inventory system where each crawler can carry around literally tons of items for instantaneous retrieval the hardest to swallow), and the battles are mostly meaningful and interesting, though there's a lot of "Carl and Donut run around killing low-level mobs to gain XP" interludes. The author has done a lot of work with his worldbuilding and plotting, doing his best to make an inherently silly premise believable, and he's dropped plenty of plot macguffins and hints of a metaplot. I liked Carl, and even that damned cat.
So this book is actually really pretty entertaining. The story moves at a fast pace, the characters (even the "NPCs") are consistently interesting, and while the writing won't win any literary awards, it's not bad. Like a lot of litrpg novels, Dungeon Crawler Carl got its start on Royal Road, but Dinniman is one of the rare authors who can write well enough to launch his books into a full-time writing gig.
However... this series is up to seven books now. I don't know where the series goes, but if it's six more books of Carl and Princess Donut fighting through dungeon levels while Carl gripes about how much he hates their alien overlords, well, I don't know if it can hold my attention that long. I would be interested in knowing if the metaplot advances and if Carl is somehow going to become involved in a galactic rebellion.
I'm certainly going to at least check out the next book.
My complete list of book reviews.
