Dungeon Crawler Carl

You have to believe me, I really really tried to have an open mind with this. I play D&D. I play fantasy RPG video games. I understood what this was trying to do. But by god was this bad. This was... unbelievably bad. It blew my mind how awful of a reading experience this was. Let this review be a warning, just because you like or relate to things like fantasy RPGs or even Isekai anime does not mean this is going to be enjoyable for you.

A man wakes up in the night because his ex-girlfriend's cat has just jumped out of the window. Being a prize winning show cat, he feels like avoiding a lawsuit from his ex is the best thing, as he reluctantly goes outside to fetch the cat. All at once, across the entire world, every building collapses, and the remaining millions of surviving earthlings are all told that their planet is being harvested for resources, and the only thing they can do to continue to survive is to participate in the newest season of the intergalactic dungeon crawl, where they descend floor by floor, down to floor 18, completing quests, gathering achievements, leveling up, and killing baddies as they fight for their survival. Without anything else telling him not to, the man, now assigned the name "Carl" and the cat, Princess Donut, descend into the dungeon where they immediately have to start fighting for their lives. After collecting a series of early game rewards, Princess Donut actually becomes intelligent enough to be another player rather than a pet, and with the ability to speak, her true relationship with Carl unfolds. But they don't have time to dwell on their personal beef, there's a game to play, and perhaps a game within a game as they learn the politics of these games, run by galactic corporations, televised across the stars where viewers can like and subscribe to crawlers. As the stakes go higher with each challenge, achievement, boss, and floor, Carl and Princess Donut fight for their survival, but more importantly, fight for the spotlight.

Could have this been good? No, probably not. Seemed tailor made for me to not like it. But it probably could have been better than it ended up being. Like maybe it could have been tolerable, but it just failed in every single way. I wasn't very familiar with the genre of litRPG before this, and now I know what to stay away from. Again, I like RPGs, but I've now learned that I do NOT like them in book format.

The main culprit here is that this is essentially a novelized version of someone playing a video game. Wait, if you think what I'm describing is like.. the story of Elden Ring written down, that is not what I mean. I mean every time you pause the game and look at your inventory, it is read out for you. Every item, every stat. When you switch to the skills tab, that is narrated. When you scroll down you skills, the skill, description and skill level is narrated. Combat multipliers are explained. Health bars are described. Spell effects, AoE damage effects, and potions are described. All in extreme detail. And keep in mind this is "supposed" to be about an alien invasion, but the bulk of this book is just a loosely fantasy based video game. There's a clumsy, hand wavey reason for this, but it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

This is often described as "fun", but I'm just not seeing it. I don't get it. Yes there were action sequences, yes there were clever "game breaking" exploits that Carl and Donut cook up. But all of this is polluted with descriptions about the color of the enemy health bars, checking the status effects of poisons afflicted, or describing how if you activate a scroll from your hotbar, you don't actually have to pull it out and read it. It was SO cumbersome and SO tedious. I audibly groaned every few pages when we get bogged down in describing how he's pulling in random spoons, tables, goblets, etc. into his inventory. The novelty of "NEW ACHIEVEMENT!" wore off after about the third one, and it happens literally hundreds of times in this book. The yo mama jokes were not funny, the dialogue was not funny. The antics were not funny. Critics of this book say that the humor seems to be written for 10-12 year old boys, but I'm actually going to give the 10 year old boys some credit here. I don't think they would like this humor at all, I think they would think it is cringy and stupid. MAYBE this would appeal to 7-8 year olds, but it is clearly not written for them considering the language and content.

Anyway this was unbelievably awful. Probably top 5 worst books I've ever read. The average goodreads rating makes me weep for my fellow readers.