Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman - 5*

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

This might be a bit of an understatement, but I might be exactly the kind of reader this book was written for. I am that sort of couch potato who played almost every major RPG flavored title since Diablo I first sent us crawlers down a 15 level dungeon to destroy the Ultimate Evil. Should I really brag about laying Diablo, Heroes of Might and Magic, Baldur’s Gate, Dungeon Siege, The Elder Scrolls, Titan Quest, Torchlight, Sacred, Grim Dawn and others? Pride and embarrassment fight it out in me at the familiarity of the setting, but laughter wins the day in the end. This series has the potential to surpass my old favorite, Ready Player One, for capturing the gamer mentality, because Dinniman has that special quality that made the difference between say Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Segal: the ability to laugh at himself and to subvert the core rules of the game with satire.

Carl is caught with his pants down by the arrival of the Apocalypse. All he can salvage before every single building on the planet is flattened down in an alien invasion is his girlfriend’s cat and a pair of white shorts printed with little hearts.
Soon enough, a booming voice announces that survivors have less than an hour to enter temporary portals in their neighbourhood or be annihilated in turn. These portals are the gateways to an 18 level World Dungeon, managed by an Artificial Intelligence with a dubious foot fetish and filled with all sorts of monsters and traps. There’s also a Tutorial Guild for those lucky enough to survive their first moments of disorientation and panic and their first encounters with the scary critters.

The story borrows from the gaming world the three pillars of player/reader engagement : the instinct to accumulate loot, the feeling of progression through skill trees and stat points, the adrenaline rush of having scary monsters jump at you from behind doors, from underground or from above.

[KateNZ]

This sounds like crazy fun! Banking it on the TBR for a rainy day!

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

I like to play games, not read about them, so this is one of the very few LitRPG books I've tried. Coming in with low expectations probably helped with having a blast following Carl and Donut through the dungeon

[Nicole]

The comment on accumulating loot is very funny to me. My husband is always bemoaning his inability to run in games because he’s always laden down with so much junk - it’s a miracle he can still walk!

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

Nicole wrote: "The comment on accumulating loot is very funny to me. My husband is always bemoaning his inability to run in games because he’s always laden down with so much junk - it’s a miracle he can still walk!"

I sometime use cheat codes to expand what it's called the stash , or create a level 1 character named The Mule to carry the loot for me. These games are designed to be addictive by gambling, so it's good to have Carl make fun of our foibles.

[Nicole]

The Mule 🤣

[Joanne]

I play Heroes of Might and Magic! In fact I wasted 4 hours today playing-LoL!

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

Joanne wrote: "I play Heroes of Might and Magic! In fact I wasted 4 hours today playing-LoL!"

Grim Dawn currently: action RPG closer to Dungeon Carl, but my character is already level 100