Okay, so this book was fantastic. Sorry to spoil my thoughts right out of the gate, but as I literally just finished it – those were my first thoughts. Loved it.
Loved it even though I am not a gamer. I mean, yes I am of that generation who grew up on video games – and by that I mean I was a kid when video games started showing up in homes. I remember playing Pong at a friends house. I remember getting our first Atari 2600, being a Sega family first. We had a Master System and Genesis before I ever owned an NES. I had a Game Gear, a Nomad (my first eBay purchase), and a Dreamcast.
I did go full Nintendo though, moving on to the GameCube, having a Game Boy Advanced, and buying a Wii probably a few years too late. I can still see it my TV, not even hooked up.
I had a hand-me-down PlayStation, but never went further with that. My last dabble into gaming was the Google Stadia that I got for free through Verizon. That was a lot of fun before Google pulled the plug.
Long way of saying – I grew up playing video games, but I am in no way a “Gamer” – hell with Stadia most of the time I played PGA Golf.
That being said, I don’t have all that much (not none, but not much) experience with RPG games, but I was familiar enough with the concepts of role-playing-games, and I had an idea of what I was getting into with Dungeon Crawler Carl. I just read and saw such hype for this book/series, and saw they were all on Kindle Unlimited, that I had to finally dive in.
And I am so glad I did.
I just had a blast with the story and the great duo of Carl and Princess Donut. I loved the writing style of Matt Dinniman, and really, really loved the world-building that was happening.
Quick summary, a dude named Carl survives an alien takeover of Earth that leads to survivors having to enter an underground dungeon/maze/death-trap game which just happens to be the most popular reality television series in the Universe. The goal is to survive and eventually making down to the next level.
Slight spoiler – I thought with this book we would see this adventure from start to end and then the next book would lead to another adventure with Carl trying to investigate more about this world. Not the case. Now I wonder if every book is just further and further along in the same setting – just deeper.
I sure as shit can’t wait to find out.
I used to not be a fan of first-person told stories, but I found over the last couple years that I have been reading more and more of them and really enjoying them. I like the restraint that it forces on stories. We can’t leave what this character is doing or saying so we only know as much as they do! With Carl, I love how he was slowly learning more about who is behind all of this and trying to piece things together – and all we could do was try to figure it out with him.
And sure, maybe I didn’t know all of the “gamer” terminology, but you didn’t really need to. I got enough it to understand what was happening and why. The important part to me was – a wild story in a world that was getting bigger and bigger as the book went on – and characters that are not perfect, but you fall in love with pretty easily.
I am not immediately reading the next book in the series right away – but I also will not be waiting that long to get to book 2.
And beyond.