Two star reviews are reserved for books that were so bad I did not finish, but had something enjoyable about them. This gets 2.5 because I finished it.

So I want to start by saying this is not a good book, and I would never recommend someone else read it. That being said, the good things about this book are that the action is fun, the characters are sometimes tolerable, and the author does a great job at two things: setting up seemingly impossible problems that the characters solve in interesting ways, and really getting a reader curious about what's going to happen next. This last one is somewhat clumsy and heavy handed, but it is very effective, so credit where credit is due.

This book is also incredibly racist and misogynistic. I'm pretty sure the author thinks most people in South America do not live or sleep in houses, either that or he thinks the continent is on the other side of the planet from North America. The book is full of gross sexist jokes, oftentimes in places and situations where they make no sense. The main character is practically sexless in the ways he responds to conversations about sex or sexuality, but the world around him is disturbingly horny, with the narrative pausing occasionally to breathlessly describe the details of an alien woman's gigantic boobs.

Also I'm pretty sure the author thinks the MC is a good person, but he chose to rob a group of people (racialized and otherized) who just helped him, then kill their leader. He accidently kills all their kids when he does this. How does this make him feel? Just kinda bad! Like a bit of a jerk! And how dare they make him feel bad about it (his words not mine.)

I use this detail to illustrate how incredibly bad at character writing the author is, at least in this first book. He really wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to write a fun and fast paced sleazy trashy adventure book, which he's pretty good at doing! But he also wants his characters to be complex and deep, he wants them to make hard and complicated choices and deal with the consequences both internally and externally, he wants to satirize our world and say something deep and meaningful about it, and at all these things he is an absolute failure. Also his worldbuilding is terrible. What a waste of an intergalactic society.

All in all I will not ever recommend this book, and will actively discourage others from reading it.

Look to be clear this is a light novel. Maybe it doesn't look like but the title of this should be. 
How I ended up in the dungeon with nothing but my cat, underwear, and dynamite. 
Taking this book as what it is. It's tremendous fun. The action goes fast enough to almost make you forget how horribly bleak the setting is. It's a decent take on the genre and compared to something like solo leveling, omvient readers viewpoint, or even any power scaling dungeon, crawling book it comes off less serious and more lovable. 
Now to be clear this book comes with a pretty big list of trigger warnings. If none of those bother you and you want something fun. It's a pretty good read.

'Dungeon Crawler Carl' by Matt Dinniman is a fun, urban fantasy that follows one man and his cat when they get pulled into an alien competition. 
When aliens invade and pit the surviving humans against each other in a televised dungeon battle, Carl is paired up with his ex-girlfriends cat, Princess Donut. Now with the ability to speak, Princess Donut and Carl will have to battle against hordes of enemies, brutal humans, and the system itself to get further into the dungeon and a chance at survival. 
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a lot of fun. Carl is a character that is easy to care about paired with one of my favorite cats in fiction. Princess Donut is hilarious and she adds a lot to the humor in the series. Outside of the humor, Carl is a deeply caring person who gets himself in trouble because he wants to genuinely help the people that he encounters. He is a good placeholder for the reader as he is learning about the weird alien game he is living within right alongside the reader. This world is populated with interesting creatures, horrifying personalities, and new twists and turns around each corner. This is a great start to a series that I will definitely be continuing with. There are some solid mysteries about the world that are set up in this volume and I also cannot wait to spend more time with Carl and Donut. 

I loved this book! contains just enough earth pop culture references to not be insufferable like Ready Player One, but is more grounded than the whimsy of hitchhiker's guide (which I loved, don't get me wrong). love the (mild) gore, satire, and crude humor. 

the game mechanics (loot boxes, leveling, stat points, etc.) got a smidge tedious—though its clear Dinniman tries to cut out down the unimportant details once readers have adjusted to premise—as well as the xp farming bits, but it's clear from the beginning that the first three levels are TRAINING. I disagree with the people grouching that the story is moving too slow because book 1 progresses through only two levels: if the levels moved any faster, y'all would've complained Carl was OP and the pace was unrealistic. once they get to level three and choose race/class, things will (hopefully) expand beyond defaulting to familiar tactics (explosives and magic missiles), and we'll get to see more inventive boss fights. it's clear that there are overarching political agendas at play, both inside and outside of the dungeon, and there are a number of complex characters that I'm invested in. 

if I had to critique something besides the repetition, it'd be Odette's obscenely massive breast armor? I get that it's high-level gear, but with the loot boxes being somewhat tailored to the crawler, I want an explanation as to how and why she ended up with the appearance she's famous for when (if?) we get the backstory on her crawl. as for the rest of the female nudity, I'm not necessarily mad about it... yet. bodies are bodies, and there's nothing wrong with describing them, and right now, Dinniman's grotesque depictions lean more into body horror than sexualization. BUT! that could change. the only other nit-picky thing I have is Donut's Second Chance spell, which is originally described as being able to raise a monster of a lower level than the caster from the dead (Chap. 30, p. 257). In Chapter 45, Carl describes that Donut "could now apparently resurrect monsters up to five levels higher than herself" (396). The word "apparently" makes me think that there's some explanation for this, but for now it's an inconsistency.

can't wait to read the next book! long live science fiction!

A Dungeons & Dragons-style dungeon crawl with the wit and imagination of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Will be sure to get you out of a reading slump as it's VERY addicting!

4⭐️
So this was something! I had never read RPGLit before, didn’t even know it was a thing tbh. It never even occurred to me to make a videogame a literal book.

It started really strong, by 15% in I thought: 5 stars, for sure. But somewhere after it started becoming a bit repetitive and the humor fell flatter. Anyways, still solid 4 stars and in general, incredibly funny! It had some very dark moments, though, so just don’t go in thinking it will be just laughs.
I don’t even know how to explain what happens here but I will just say that the dynamic between the MCs is gold!
Read this physically cause I don’t really like audiobooks but I think it would have been better on audio, just fyi.

Btw, I’m a Donut stan now.