Spoilers: Mild (premise, themes, and early plot developments)
Genre: Science Fiction, LitRPG
Format: Hardback
Source: Bought
Rating: Liked
On my copy of Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC), under the dust jacket, it says, ‘You Will Not Break Me’. Whatever else you think of Carl, this sentiment holds true through book one and, based on what happens here, through the series as a whole.
DCC is one of the most popular titles in the relatively new genre label of LitRPG, and it deserves that status.
It focuses on Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, who just happen to be outside in the right place when the game commences and wipes out most of humanity.
As a reward for surviving this near-extinction-level event, all new players, Crawlers, must survive a series of puzzles, skirmishes, and occasional boss battles against “things” that are solely there to kill them. Their survival mostly depends on getting stronger and killing “things”, even if those things turn out to be their fellow humans.
I had to pause reading DCC around 1/3 of the way in, as I grew uncomfortable with Carl’s initial portrayal.
I am very much a ‘I care about the people more than the system’ person. Carl kills a confused, mutated woman and a crèche of goblin babies, showing little reaction to either his actions or his foes’ deaths.
I may have prematurely concluded that ‘I understand what DCC is trying to do, and I don’t think finishing it will change that—but maybe I’ll come to like it.’
But thinking more about the fact that it falls within the system-apocalypse microgenre, and reading around the subject, I wanted to push on and see if I was getting the full picture.
After picking it back up and reading more, I did. I saw Carl as stoic and practical in his response — he later reflects that they are all there to die. Given Carl’s background as a Coast Guard veteran, I wondered if that’s just how they make them. His cat does act like an arsehole. But that’s a cat for you, especially one with trophies and rosettes, though even she acknowledges that Carl is trying to do the right thing in challenging circumstances.
Given his mantra of ‘You Will Not Break Me’, I started taking notes on when Carl was sympathetic or heroic in the face of everything he’s been pitted against. I feel the evidence shows he’s a ‘good guy’ in a bad world, and it makes you wonder what you would do. Just wait to die? Or try to survive and hope?
The ‘cleverness’ of this work, and perhaps of the genre, is that it takes the core mechanics of an RPG and reveals the brutal reality behind them. The system is against him—he’s there to kill and, ultimately, to die, in an entertaining way.
And that’s what video games do: they work in the abstract; they are pixels on a screen, and now there’s blood on the dungeon floor.
This isn’t a game. It’s real life, with all the complexities and the games within games that we all experience.
Carl gets to see that as he’s introduced to more than one of the Wizards behind the curtain. And in later scenes, Matt draws Carl into what the game represents: the politics, the promises and the control it exerts over everyone, because almost everyone is a victim.
As a video game-to-page adaptation, I can’t fault it. The explanations of weapons, bosses, and other baddies are good, and the AI overseer is funny, often inappropriately so. It feels like a video game experienced through all five senses.
You have to assume that everyone is going to die, including the crawlers and the NPCs (non-playable characters), even if they themselves might not know it. It’s a story told against that injustice, focusing on a character who’s trying his best, given his upbringing and background.
There is a lot to enjoy. The interactions, the characters, the system, the politics, and the backdrop against which it’s set.
Am I going to read the next one? Yes. And the one after that. I’m told that books 2 and 3 need to be read together to get the point Dinniman is trying to make.
I don’t think it’s a celebratory story; it’s brutal and shows the reality of RPGs while trying to satirise late-stage capitalism, which values money and entertainment over anything an individual might experience.
Do I expect it to soften its use of problematic gazes (see below)? Hopefully. I hear that it does as the series continues.
I guess we’ll see.
Addendum:
As a satire on capitalism, it’s complicated. Carl and probably the author, Matt, see the world through a white male gaze. I know more about the anatomy of his encounters with women than I wish. I’m not sure he ever mentions the guns, pecs, and thighs of any of the men he encounters.
As other commentary has pointed out, it’s great to call out what capitalism represents, but it might still rely too heavily on the language and framing of the worldview it’s trying to satirise, which makes it hard to distinguish between commentary and ingrained bias.
Gav Reads 