Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by mikerickson
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
1.0
Sometimes when I want to be particularly disparaging of something I've read I'll say something like, "this wasn't so much a book as much as it was a literary product designed to make the author money." I'm not even going that far this time; this was a <i>thing.</i> This was a sorry collection of words that I had the misfortune of having to read for a book club pick. 'If you hated it so much, why not DNF it?' I hear you ask. Because I know the only thing worse than a hater is an uninformed hater, so I steeled myself and dove right into this cesspit not quite certain if I'd make it to the other side. I did, and I'm not better for it.
This book is bad. The "humor" is forced and unsuccessful, the protagonist resists developing motives or emotions, and the reader is forced to wade through a genuinely shocking amount of tedious item descriptions and pop-up notifications. And this isn't coming from a stick-in-the-mud who hates fun; I've grown up playing RPGs like any self-respecting red-blooded millennial, both in video games and at tabletops. But nothing about inventory management or speccing into subclasses translates well to a text-based medium where the audience has no agency or ability to interact with the source material. I don't like being told, "you're having fun now," by someone I can't respond to. And apparently 'litRPG' is an entire genre of other books like this? The appeal escapes me.
There are (very) brief glimpses of themes that threaten to become interesting in between the seemingly obligatory action scenes that occur because they have to. I thought we'd get some commentary on how citizens of an imperial core can view violence and struggles in far-off colonized lands as passive entertainment rather than the tragedy it is, but any time we skirt too close to approaching anything that might be considered vulnerable we have to ruin the moment with some slapstick bullshit.
And you're telling me that there are <i>EIGHT</i> of these books? I wish the author had developed a crippling masturbation addiction instead because the end result would've been the same and we'd all be spared this nonsense.
This book is bad. The "humor" is forced and unsuccessful, the protagonist resists developing motives or emotions, and the reader is forced to wade through a genuinely shocking amount of tedious item descriptions and pop-up notifications. And this isn't coming from a stick-in-the-mud who hates fun; I've grown up playing RPGs like any self-respecting red-blooded millennial, both in video games and at tabletops. But nothing about inventory management or speccing into subclasses translates well to a text-based medium where the audience has no agency or ability to interact with the source material. I don't like being told, "you're having fun now," by someone I can't respond to. And apparently 'litRPG' is an entire genre of other books like this? The appeal escapes me.
There are (very) brief glimpses of themes that threaten to become interesting in between the seemingly obligatory action scenes that occur because they have to. I thought we'd get some commentary on how citizens of an imperial core can view violence and struggles in far-off colonized lands as passive entertainment rather than the tragedy it is, but any time we skirt too close to approaching anything that might be considered vulnerable we have to ruin the moment with some slapstick bullshit.
And you're telling me that there are <i>EIGHT</i> of these books? I wish the author had developed a crippling masturbation addiction instead because the end result would've been the same and we'd all be spared this nonsense.