It's Satire. Is It GOOD Satire? - Dungeon Crawler Carl Review

本站添加: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]I put off reading Dungeon Crawler Carl for a very long time, but I did finally read it in December. And yes, it's now May and I'm only just now sharing my review for it, but hey, you know, you know, I got here eventually. I have a lot of friends who really love this book and I have friends who don't like this book. I figured that there was probably a 50/50 chance of me landing Of course, it's 50/50. There's only two options.

[00:00:20]Whatever, I'm sticking with it. I figured there was a 50/50 shot of me either enjoying it or not liking it and a lot of that would hinge on the humor.

[00:00:27]From what I knew about the book, I figured that would probably be my hinge point of like where I would fall on that line and I was both correct and incorrect on that in ways we'll get into in a minute. And I say that cuz I'm actually going to talk about it right now. I already recorded my review. It's actually the same review that's on my Good Reads. So like this is going to be the same review whether you saw it on Good Reads, TikTok, wherever, but I already recorded it and posted it to TikTok and I do not want to re-record that. You don't understand how long it takes me to record anything. For something like a review, something where I want to make sure I'm hitting all the right points, I script it out and then I speak it and I talk in like I do one continuous take and then I just edit out the parts that work. It's a 6-minute video that I think took me 49 minutes to record. And that's not because I cut a bunch of content. It's literally me just saying the same thing over and over again trying to get a take where like I've said it well, I've not tripped over my words, and I've gotten all of the words correct in the right order and like the sentence makes sense. I am not good at this. All of which is to preface that I'm just going to put that video in here. So we're about to switch to a vertical video. My apologies. You also might see me posting more of these cuz I have some longer TikTok videos that are too long for YouTube shorts, so I want to post them just long form here. Um but they're vertical videos, so we're going to figure that out. I'm going to stop talking now. Here's Here's my review for this book. I finally read Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman a few months ago. I'm finally going to talk about it and I'm going to apologize in advance to everybody who's been commenting and DMing that you can't wait to hear what I thought about this book because I don't think you're going to like this. This was a deeply unpleasant experience of a read. And before anybody asks, yes, I listened to the audiobook.

[00:01:59]I actually think that that made this a lot more insufferable than it might have been otherwise, but I'll get to that in a bit. This book to me felt like reading Serious Sam. Now, I love Serious Sam. I do. But you know what I don't want when I'm playing that game? To be in Sam's head. Because Sam is an idiot, and I don't care what he thinks. I'm here to pick up big gun, shoot alien, and that is a great time because I don't have to listen to him much. But in all seriousness, while I genuinely think the premise of this book is very interesting, I hated the execution from pretty much the beginning. Comedy is so subjective that if you don't personally find something funny, it's just going to be an insufferable experience, and that's unfortunately where I landed here. I grew up in the Xbox Live lobbies of the early 2000s, mainly in Halo and Call of Duty lobbies. So, believe you me, I have simply had my fill of this brand of humor. I didn't find it all that funny when I was 12, and I certainly don't find it funny as a grown adult. Half the comedy in this book is just a handful of fat jokes in a trench coat disguised as a sense of humor, and the other half is just the same four or five jokes played over and over and over again for 13 straight hours. Yes, the cat has a very silly voice and is very haughty. Yeah, Carl doesn't have any pants or shoes, and the game AI has a foot fetish. Yes, Carl's girlfriend was a serial cheater and is a horrid person.

[00:03:09]Yada yada yada, over and over again for 13 hours. And given the fact that I have seen on all the the the subsequent book covers that he still has no pants or shoes, I imagine that is going to continue to be a joke, and it's just not funny. And when it's not just annoying, the humor veers into pretty over racism and sexism. The text does attempt to provide a sort of in-world explanation for the presence of that racism and sexism, but I don't think it ever actually justifies its existence or the fact that it is played for laughs. As always, it's never to say that harmful stereotypes can't or shouldn't be addressed in books. The question is about how the narrative deals with it and what it has to say about them. This book has very little to say about them.

[00:03:44]I very much get the feeling that Matt Dinniman thinks that he is satirizing toxic gamer bro culture, right? The racism, the fat phobia, the sexism. But the execution is so poor the text just ends up perpetuating it. Moving on from that though, to speak to the narrative structure of this book also feels like a mess. We spend the first roughly quarter of this book stuck in a seemingly endless tutorial that explains in detail every basic function of a video game including how to open and close a menu with an X button multiple times. And yet somehow by not much further than the halfway point of the book, the dungeon crawl itself has already begun to feel repetitive. Now, this is something that dungeon crawler video games also have to deal with, right? Like making the same run and the same motions and the same actions feel fresh and new or at least leveled up and enjoyable for upwards of hundreds of hours at a time. And that's just something this book never succeeded at for me. The underlying story should be the thing that keeps me going through the sort of monotonous crawl, but it never materializes into much. There are some really interesting themes on the surface here that I would have liked to see the text engage with more deeply.

[00:04:42]The importance of community to humanity.

[00:04:44]I think Carl's determination to stay with weaker groups when he could succeed faster on his own is commendable. The way narrative distance and mob mentality allows people to dehumanize others and excuse or even celebrate in violence against them, helplessness against a more technologically advanced colonial power, but the narrative never seems all that interested in engaging with those things beyond the surface level like presence of a concept. And before anybody tries to tell me that I'm wrong because if I just keep reading book three or book five deals with X, Y, or Z thing, that is not helpful to me here in this book, which is the one that this review is for. I am interested to try another lit RPG or two because I don't really want this to be my only view of this sub genre and I'm generally curious how it reads for me. Like I wonder if being a lifelong gamer makes me more or less likely to enjoy this kind of narrative framing. In this case, it was often intolerable to have to sit through what amounted to the longest and dullest tutorial of my life explaining health and mana and menus and tool tips, but I wonder if that was indicative of the entire genre or if this book in particular was just overly explanatory.

[00:05:38]And did I only hate that because I already have such a deep working knowledge of what all that stuff is or did other people who aren't coming from the same base level of knowledge feel the same way like that it was too hand-holdy. I'm actually extremely curious where people who are not gamers land on this. So, if you've made it this far and are willing to engage with the question in good faith, please feel free to sound off in the comments. I I'm very curious. But, to get back to Dungeon Crawler Carl, this book just didn't do anything good for me. While I find the foundational premise of this story very interesting, the Call of Duty lobby level of humor and the repetitiveness of the narrative made this a slog to read.

[00:06:09]To be quite honest, were this not a friend's pick for a personal book club that we do, I would have DNF'd this in the first couple of hours and been so much happier for it. And finally, while I know that literally everybody says that the audio books are the best way to experience this story, I don't know why.

[00:06:24]Like I I like I do, I think I know what people are talking about when they really like it, but I it's not I don't like it. Knock-off Patrick Warburton actually made this a much worse experience than I think I might have had otherwise. I mean, I wouldn't have liked it anyway, but I feel like it made my annoyance levels like just that much higher. I do get that the production elements of this particular audio producer adds in and puts the time into, things like the voice effects and such, are fun, but the actual performance of the narrator trying so overly hard to sound like Patrick Warburton was just grating the entire time. And the game AI voice that's just blatantly ripping off Claptrap, yeah, that got old very quickly. I think it actively added to how derivative this whole book felt, right? Like the book itself feels derivative of the video games and tabletop games that it's pulling from, but then the audiobook on top of that feels very derivative of the performances it seems determined to copy. This is the text message I sent along with a clip of the part where Carl gets to sell like 10 or so achievements in a row, and I had to sit and listen to Teemu Claptrap scream, "New achievement!" over and over and over again. I do wish that I had had a better time with this book, right? That I was interested in binging the series the way I've seen so many other people do, people that I know who have had a really great time just plowing through the whole series.

[00:07:32]But alas, I hated this.

[00:07:36]I will not be reading any more of these.