“the sight of myself up on the screen, running full tilt through the Over City with nothing but a one-armed leather jacket and my nuts dangling free filled me with a strange, almost primal sense of vulnerability. I don’t know how nudists ever got used to it. ”
Matt Dinniman must have had the best time writing Dungeon Crawler Carl. It comes through the books, and this series might be the most fun I have reading something in the last five years or so. It is impossible to dislike this. Let me paint a picture for you from the first book,
“It’s the most-watched game show in the galaxy!
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth–from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds to all the trucks and cars–collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.
The buildings and all the people inside, they’ve 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 views and your followers. 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.”
Part Running Man, part Survivor, all balled up into a litRPG novel that has you laughing your ass off and cheering for Carl, the man running around barefoot in boxers with hearts on them and a leather jacket, and Princess Donut, the most brilliant Persian kitty left in the universe. They face countless baddies while trying to level up and not die a horrible death watched by Trillions of people across the galaxy.
This book, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, has Carl and Donut entering level three, the overcity. It rains dead prostitutes; there are evil clowns and an ancient spell that might spell doom for all the players. It is fast-paced and easy to follow. You will be cheering by the end because Carl is a man who is done with this shit, yet he must go on because “they will not break (him).”
I am listening to the book’s audio, which heightens the fun. Jeff Hays is killing it with distinctive voices so much so that I will find everything he has done and listen to them as a matter of principle.
I wish I had more constructive things to say about this binge-worthy series except gushing, but I don’t. It is seriously that good.
