I am NOT into the lit rpg thing in general despite being a powernerd for both lit and rpg’s… But I’ve got to say, Dungeon Crawler Carl is just a fun read regardless of belonging to a genre I don’t care for. While it is heavy into the dungeon crawl scene (as one might expect), it’s light on the stat dumps and similar things I find obnoxious about the genre, and incorporates all the gamification elements seamlessly enough that I don’t feel like I’m stuck in an impenetrable min/max build messageboard. In fact, pretty much all of the gamification feels pretty well done and intriguing!
Aside from that, I’m impressed with the gradual buildup in the series from the scrub dungeon crawler just trying to survive to the teambuilding and then ultimately to attacking the entire meta of the game itself… And how thats being approached with strategy, stealth, loopholing, politics, and economics in addition to violence. The characters all feel well fleshed out and quite compelling, with quite a bit of both character growth and development of their power in unique and interesting ways.
I think my only complaint with the series is that while there’s a lot of whimsy / absurdity / juvenile humor that works really well, particularly at the start, some of it starts to feel a bit weird and out of place later on in the series when things start getting more serious and intense. That is NOT to say I don’t appreciate the humor in absurdity or that humor and tension don’t go well together, just in some particular cases in later books it feels a bit off.
And saving the best for last, we have our narrator. He is AMAZING. If I didn’t know better (because I double checked / looked it up), I would literally have believed that it was done by a multi-person cast. He has an incredible range of accents, inflections, dynamic range, tonality… It’s nuts. He is easily the best narrator I have ever had the pleasure of listening to in my AT LEAST six thousand plus hours of audiobook listening.