Book review: Dungeon Crawler Carl

Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl

How to speak about this book without spoiling things... The Setting is: Carl just got out of his house to catch his cat, Princess Donut, when suddenly all buildings and structures in Earth collapse, killing everything inside. Then some alien voice announce that survivors must go through an intergalactic TV-show through a deadly 18-levels dungeon if they wish to survive. Oh, and the cat becomes "a crawler" and can speak.

If the argument left you thinking WTF, I know, it also did to me. But with the book being such a success, I decided to give it a go anyway. And I can say that now I'm hooked to it, I already began with the 2nd title. It is a very nerdy book: RPGs, videogames, superheroes, and lots of humour. Despite the absurd story, everything else connects not in a cohesive way, but in a very entertaining combination. The fancy cat has high intelligence and charisma, so you have her from charming NPCs to brush her, to shooting magic missiles to enemies and teleporting herself. Carl instead becomes mostly accidentally an unarmed melee tank, but also suitably good with explosives. The enemies, in a maybe distant nod to The Witcher, have their lives and feelings and points of view, so there might be a way to avoid having to fight with all those goblins... or perhaps not.

I really don't want to spoil anything because, at least for the first title, you easily align with the journey of discovery of the main character; He is as surprised as you of everything that is happening, and for the most part, he's just a regular guy lucky enough to survive the alien "attack" but unlucky to not have brought pants and boots to the dungeon.

If you enjoy either or both pen & paper and/or computer RPGS, grab the book and read it.