Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl #1) by Matt Dinniman

Format: Audio (Audible)
Read: May 2026

Dungeon Crawler Carl seems to be everywhere at the moment! I’ve been aware of the book for a while, but wasn’t sure I’d like it, so I put it to the back of my mind until it cropped up in a 2 for 1 Audible sale. I thought it would give me another Law of Fives first in a series, and maybe second in a series if I like it! I also got The Will of Many by James Islington as another option.

You will have surmised from the 4-star rating that I did indeed like it! It was a rocky start, as with Gideon the Ninth, I was unsure of the tone and humour, but I gave it a chance, and I really got into it!

The audiobook is truly excellent. Jeff Hays is a very talented voice actor doing a full performance with unique voices for all the characters, and voice effects for the AI and some of the aliens. For me at least, never having read LitRPG (a genre I’d never heard of), this really helped to bring the whole story to life, and I think made the in-game announcements (REWARD!) a bit less annoying than they might be to read.

LitRPG is a genre in which the protagonist is aware they are inside a computer game, and the game elements – like stats, class, loot boxes etc – are a part of the story. Dungeon Crawler Carl begins in a very Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy way, aliens rock up with a bureaucratic announcement and level all the buildings on Earth, immediately killing everyone who was inside at the time. Survivors are invited to go down any of the mysterious stairs that appear and take part in an IRL dungeon-crawling game. A game they are told can be won by reaching level 18, and the prize is to get back control of the planet.

Carl happens to be outside, in the freezing cold, at 3 am looking for his ex-girlfriend’s cat, who had just run out. He isn’t wearing any trousers or socks, having slipped his bare feet into his ex’s too-small pink Crocs to quickly run after the cat. The number of times the fact that he was wearing those specifically pink Crocs was mentioned drove me up the wall at the start. It was amusing at first to picture such a large man in tiny shoes, but the repetition started to give it a misogynistic edge… But, thank God, he loses them, and we don’t have to hear about them again. Based on the rest of the book, I think this was just meant to be humorous.

I really wasn’t sure about Carl at first, especially with the deep gruff voice Jeff Hays gives him. It’s a very American and exaggeratedly masculine; it’s basically an impression of Patrick Warburton, so that’s who I pictured. I was afraid he was going to just be the stereotypical Default Man, but he has depth. He loves Princess Donut (despite being frequently exasperated by her, which is cat ownership!), he’s compassionate and puts helping others above his own interests in the game, and he’s clearly more intelligent than the 3 points the game’s AI gives him.

Very early in the game/story Princess Donut (full title Grand Champion, Breed Winner Regional, National Winner Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk) is transformed from a simple animal to an active player in the game with the ability to speak. She has the prissy, childlike and impulsive personality of a typical cat. She absolutely loves attention, and so the fact that the game is on television excited her and she is obsessed with gaining followers and favourites.

She also occasionally casually drops in all the times Beatrice, Carl’s ex, was cheating on him with multiple men and at least one woman. She does this so nonchalantly that it really cracked me up.  Bea is ostensibly dead, but I’d not be surprised if she turns up at some point in the series.

There are many other characters in the story;  human crawlers, Non Player Characters like Mordecai the trainer, and Aliens involved with the management of the game and entertainment shows that feed off it. These hint at the universe outside the game and the political and social forces that are affecting it. It seems like everybody is trapped inside a hypercapitalistic, brutally exploitative system that mines planets for both natural resources and a whole network of entertainment. It was this that really got me hooked – I want to know what’s going on!

The other crawlers are people from all over the world who were outside when the aliens struck (and chose to go down the steps). For Americans, these are people outside in the middle of the night, which gives room for a little bit of social commentary.

The tone and humour took a little while to click in for me. It reminded me of Borderlands, but more offensive! The game’s so-called humour is extremely crude and relies on stereotypes (obese people, gym bros, “Karens” etc), and there are also a lot of foot fetish jokes. This is intentionally written and a feature of this cruel world. Carl finds it as revolting as I did and pushes back on it, so in the end, I found it tolerable (and sometimes even funny).

For me, the humour and the heart of the book are in Carl’s relationship with Donut. Like all cats, she’s a PIA at least half the time, but he loves her, and they do become a funny little team! I also really liked Mordecia, and the subtle hints he gives them to help them with the game and clues about the outside world.

Some of the game elements do get repetitive. I am a gamer, so I know how games work! The notifications and descriptions of rewards and loot boxes got a bit tiresome, but I found I actually did quite enjoy Carl weighing up his choices and trying to strategise. The story is being told by Carl in retrospect (I’m not sure who he is addressing), and there are times when the narrative feels a bit choppy between when the reader is included in the planning and when Carl’s pre-planned actions are a surprise, and we get it explained afterwards.

Overall, I had fun with this, and I got a lot more invested in it than I expected to! I’ve already got the next book on the go.

For Law of Fives, this is an author new to me, the first book in a series and for my Sci-Fi genre exploration, I’m going to count LitRPG!