The apocalypse will be televised!
A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.
The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.
Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.
You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big.
You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.
They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game.
My Opinion: 446 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure: I received an advanced copy for review. I purchased a copy when it became available.
This is another odd but highly entertaining novel from Matt Dinniman.
This time earth is turned into a dungeon with only a fraction of the population surviving the initial transformation. The survivors must dungeon dive while being watched by an intergalactic audience. Dungeon Crawler Carl, the main character (MC), and his cat companion, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, must survive the monsters, the other players, and figure out a way to entertain the audience to get sponsors which may mean the difference between life and death.
The story plays like a twisted version of the hunger games mixed with a dungeon crawl. There's all manner of weird monsters and a social aspect that adds a nice twist to the story. The plotting is pretty slice of life with no major goals beyond surviving and the story ends on a little bit of a cliff hanger like a serial story pausing between arcs.
The game stuff is regular and intricate part of the story world. Lots of notifications and item and spell descriptions. Levels, stats, etc all exist but take a bit of a backseat this book.
Overall, I thought the story was really good. Like all of the author's work, he gives a standard trope, the dungeon crawl, a quirky, odd, sometimes gruesome twist which I found interesting.
Score: 7.9 out of 10