“Are you kidding? The Syndicate consists of over three billion independent star systems. Every season, a new Dungeon Crawler World debuts across the net. Quintillions of citizens of the Syndicate become obsessed with the Crawl.”
page 35, Mordecai and Carl
​”Wait, so this is like a TV show? Like Survivor?”
Table of Contents
Why Dungeon Crawler Carl?
I am fairly sure I first heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl a couple years ago from the booktuber cari can read. At the time I did not think much of it, nothing about the book caught my interest and I never looked into the book further.
Fast-forward a couple years and I saw a mutual on the fediverse share a review of the book on the indie arts and culture website jank.cool. I did not read the entirety of the review because that required a paid subscription to the site which I didn’t have and wasn’t sure I wanted. But the excerpt I read was enough to get me interested in the book again.
Coincidentally, someone on a Discord server I am in also started talking shit about the book and so I did something I don’t usually do. I bought myself a physical copy of the book on a Saturday (July 18th) and did what I’d call a hate-read of the book over the next two days. I don’t think I have ever intentionally hate-read a book I was fairly sure I was going to dislike but here we are.
I read a hardcover edition of the book (ISBN/UID – 9780593820247) published by Ace Books in August 2024. Blurbs on my edition are from – Felicia Day, Scott Lynch, and Will Wight. This is my first (and last) time reading anything by Matt Dinniman.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a LitRPG fantasy novel. It follows the story of the titular Carl and his talking cat Princess Donut as they navigate a series of dungeon levels set up by aliens as part of a game show that’s been aired out to trillions of viewers across the universe. This dungeon is created after the aliens kill almost everyone on Earth and the survivors go into the dungeon.
LitRPGs and Dungeon Crawls
Before we go any further, it is worth discussing the genre itself – LitRPG in this case means literary role-playing game. Essentially, a table-top role playing game or a video game role-playing game turned into a book. This is my first time reading a LitRPG novel.
LitRPG novels are by themselves not anything new. That said, it is not a subgenre that has to my awareness been popular in the English speaking literary world and as the Wikipedia page indicates is predominantly a Thing in the Japanese, Korean, and Russian literary worlds. So Dungeon Crawler Carl is notable in the sense that it is the first to gain mass popularity in the English speaking world (and it has since been translated into other languages).
Now to the concept of a dungeon crawl which is also nothing new. I’ll let the Wikipedia definition explain.
A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games (RPGs) in which heroes navigate a labyrinth environment (a “dungeon“), battling various monsters, avoiding traps, solving puzzles, and looting any treasure they may find.[1] Video games and board games which predominantly feature dungeon crawl elements are considered to be a genre.[1][2][3]
Wikipedia contributors. (2026, June 7). Dungeon crawl. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:37, July 22, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dungeon_crawl&oldid=1358177904
I have never played a TTRPG in my life so all of my experience of dungeon crawl scenarios comes from video games, roguelite games like Hades II, and more recently Vampire Crawlers – just to name a couple examples of games that feature dungeon crawls as a major element of their gameplay loops.
All that said, Dungeon Crawler Carl is a LitRPG that definitely is supposed to be more video game RPG than tabletop RPG. It has elements of video games like menus, achievement notifications, lootboxes, inventory management etc. The TTRPG inspiration come in the form of character stats, buffs, debuffs (stats like constitution, charisma etc.). The main character also makes references to having played Dungeons & Dragons at certain points in the story.
The Signs Were There
Alice Bell’s review of Dungeon Crawler Carl calls out the book’s dedication as the warning sigh, which yes, I agree with. But for me, the bigger warning sign that really made me roll my eyes was the epigraph.
Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; ​
The Venerable Bede
when the Coliseum falls, ​so will Rome; ​
when Rome falls, ​so will the world.
Regular readers of my blog may remember my review of The Will of the Many where I mentioned that I find a lot of the fantasy genre’s references to Ancient Rome and its cultural and military hegemony to be cringe, to put it politely. So when I saw this quote in this book’s epigraph it made me roll my eyes. After finishing the book, I realized that the epigraph has almost nothing to do with the text itself.
The only part of the epigraph that is relevant is the fall of the world, the book takes place after the apocalyptic event wipes out most of Earth and its population. The Colosseum being an equivalent to the narrative’s game show is one hell of a stretch since y’know it doesn’t take place in Rome and the book is in a contemporary setting where Ancient Rome hasn’t existed for thousands of years and the quote assumes some sort of Ancient Roman hegemony which is again just cringe.
I cannot remember the last time I actually spent time thinking about a book’s epigraph for more than five minutes, because it is usually some pithy quote from a long-dead person that is somewhat relevant to the book’s narrative. I am pretty sure I thought about this epigraph for longer than Matt Dinniman did. And, the conclusion I came to is that its just there because it maybe sounds cool. Which it is not. Stop trying to make Ancient Rome cool.
Characters
Dungeon Crawler Carl has two main characters you need to give a fuck about – Carl and his companion Princess Donut, the talking cat. The book itself does not give a fuck about any other characters, most of them are disposable characters that are referred to as NPCs (non-playable characters) and they get very little if any character development. The non-NPCs (aka other “crawlers”) are barely characters.
Let’s talk about Carl for a moment. Notable characteristics include being tall, being a gamer who is bad at Call of Duty, being cheated on, being a former member of the Coast Guard where he definitely learned a lot of hand-to-hand combat skills. How convenient. Also did I mention he was in the Coast Guard? Yeah, he was a technician. The book sure keeps mentioning his life in the Coast Guard a lot for inscrutable reasons Is being in the Coast Guard supposed to be a redeeming quality? Is it supposed to be cool?
I’ll let the book do the heavy lifting here with a physical description of Carl:
I’m not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but this is important information right here. I stand six foot, three inches tall. I weigh about 230 pounds, and while I wasn’t in nearly as good shape as I was while I was on active duty, I’d been hitting the gym three times a week for years, building my muscle mass. I’d always been blessed with one of those bodies that naturally held muscle well. My dad was a linebacker. Hell, even my mom was five foot ten. And her dad had played center for Oregon State before becoming a prison guard.
page 29
Man, who the fuck cares if your mom was five foot ten? Or that your maternal grandfather played center for Oregon State before becoming a prison guard? What is the point of this overly self-aggrandizing description of this character? The description could have been cut off at “muscle mass” and would have been marginally less annoying to read.
As for character development, there isn’t any real character development for Carl throughout the course of the book. Sure he physically gets stronger using the video game like level-up mechanics of the dungeon itself but as a character he continues to remain a mediocre dumbass who keeps getting lucky because the dungeon’s AI seems to really like him for a reason I’ll get into later.
Dungeon Crawler Carl keeps trying to haphazardly do character development for Carl by dropping tidbits of his backstory from his childhood, about his terrible dad, the time he spent playing Frogger, the time his dad destroyed a slingshot he built and all of it just feels awkwardly forced into the prose as singular references that don’t amount to much of anything.
Now onto Princess Donut, who is a Persian show cat that has won a fair amount of these cat show competitions. A bit into the dungeon, Donut transforms into a talking cat. At first I liked Donut as a character because she was a welcome contrast to Carl’s mediocrity but it quickly became apparent that this book’s characterization deficiency was terminal.
Donut turned out to be another shallow character, extremely narcissistic, calling herself royalty, and acting like royalty and just generally being an extremely annoying piece of shit. It takes a lot to me make me really dislike a talking cat character but boy howdy did this book make me dislike Donut. She gets even less character development than Carl and it seems she is mostly there to serve as a vehicle for banter rather than be an actual character.
Bad Writing
The writing style in Dungeon Crawler Carl can best be described as tedious and obnoxious. This would be because this book embraces its video game inspiration to the fullest and gives us full text for every achievement Carl gets in the dungeon, in addition to the item descriptions and boss descriptions. On page 50, the entire page is filled with a list of in-game achievements and descriptions.
This is the worst instance of this but it is a thing that Dungeon Crawler Carl keeps doing all the way till the end and it made this book a slog to get through. By the end of it, I was basically skimming these item/skill/boss descriptions because I was so tired of getting interrupted by them every few pages. It completely breaks the book’s narrative flow. There is a reason video games make these kinds of descriptions optional reading that you have to go into a menu to read.
This is perhaps the greatest example of why you cannot just transplant aspects of different media formats whole cloth into each other and expect it to work. Video games and books are very different media formats and what works in a video game doesn’t necessarily work in a book. I kept wondering how much shorter the book would be if these descriptions were cut out or woven in more seamlessly into the text which is not good for a book whose entire gimmick are these bits of descriptive text.
The writing is also very flat as Alice Bell astutely points out in her review. The book has a very “X happened, and then Carl did Y thing” style of event narration over and over again. There is no sense of environment to the whole thing. I don’t think I could tell you what any of what the various dungeon floors actually looked like.
It felt like I was reading about Carl traversing the literary equivalent of Skyrim’s procedurally generated dungeons, bland and completely forgettable. Now, this can work in a video game because you have well y’know actual gameplay you can engage with to keep things interesting. You can choose weapons and abilities and use them as you so fit. A book has no such interactivity so you just get drudgery without any of the fun bits of a video game.
Think about it is this way – imagine a dry play-by-play narration of your actions in a video game with bad jokes interrupting the flow just to try and spice said narration up. And then, imagine that got turned into a book. That’s what Dungeon Crawler Carl is.
Dungeon Crawler Cringe
Dungeon Crawler Carl is ostensibly a satirical novel. It is supposed to be satirizing video games and video game culture. The problem is that none of it is funny and this is yet another classic case of failed satire where making satire by just doing the Bad Thing is not enough.
Every item, boss, and skill description is an opportunity for the book to make a joke of some kind and at best these are eye roll inducing cringe and at worse they are doing a little bit of misogyny or ableism as a bit that is never really addressed by any of the characters of the book at any point.
I’m just going to list a few examples here.
Toad Cudgel
page 57, misogynist joke
​Big stick for bonking. Bonk toad. Bonk mob. Bonk girlfriend and drag back to cave by hair.
“Nor am I wearing a cloak that makes me look like I won a participation trophy at the special needs comic con, Carl. I’m a cat. Cats don’t wear pants. Don’t be so droll.”
page 69, Princess Donut, ableist joke
New achievement! Like a Moth to the Flame.
You attacked and caused damage to a mob that is more than 75 levels above your own. That fact that you’re reading this suggests you’re the luckiest fucker in the dungeon. Just remember, luck goes both ways, like your mom.Reward: You’ve received a Platinum Lucky Bastard Box
page 332, cringe joke
Why am I reading a “your mom” joke in a fantasy novel in the year of our goddess 2026? Ugh.
There is also a running gag throughout the entirety of the book. The gag is that the alien AI that runs the dungeon has a feet fetish and a thing for Carl’s feet more specifically. The first reference to this is in the “Podophilia” achievement in the picture of the achievement list from earlier in this review. The book runs this gag into the ground with more jokes from Donut and in item descriptions for items that Carl receives.
“Being eaten by a bugbear makes me uncomfortable, Carl. So if your boyfriend ogling your tootsies keeps these easy-peasy bugs coming at us instead of more of those lava-spitting llamas, then you better buck up, get over your human male privilege, and take one for your princess.”
page 78, Princess Donut
So the entire joke here is that the AI has a foot fetish and likes Carl because of his pretty feet and thus favours him with good loot and making him even more into the special chosen one than he already is. In a better written book, this might have been funny but in this book it just means I take more psychic damage.
I found none of the jokes in this book funny at all, I did not laugh even once, not even a mild chuckle. Dungeon Crawler Carl is filled with this kind of juvenile humour all the way through and it was extremely tiring to read as a result. It felt like I was reading one long stand-up comedy set where the jokes were both unfunny and paced really poorly. A truly miserable experience.
Concluding Thoughts
Dungeon Crawler Carl is poorly written “chosen one” slop with juvenile humour and poor characterization. Its somewhat interesting narrative premise is completely marred by its various glaring flaws. As someone who enjoys a video game RPG every once in a while, I am both offended and baffled.
Offended because this makes video game RPGs look bad and I can name a few different video game RPGs with much better writing than this book; actually I think every video game RPG I have played has better writing than this. Hell, your D&D campaign with your buddies probably has better writing than this. Video games deserve better representation than this.
Baffled because I don’t understand who this book is for. It is certainly not for me and I don’t understand why this book is so popular. If you are someone who enjoys this book and this series, feel free to reach out using the contact form to let me know why. Likewise, if you are someone who is part of the DCC haters club, feel free to contact me with your commiseration.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is now the worst book I’ve ever read. Surpassing both Heavenly Tyrant and Yesteryear in that category. I didn’t think I would ever read a book that was more cringe inducing than Heavenly Tyrant but here we are.
Don’t read Dungeon Crawler Carl. That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
P.S – if you are in the mood for some actually good stand-up comedy, go check out Fern Brady, she is actually funny and has a great delivery style unlike Matt Dinniman.
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