I love, love, love this series. More Carl. More Donut. More chaos. In this continuation of the Dungeon Crawl game show with Carl, Princess Donut, Mongo, and Rend they once again try to survive and get to the next level. Despite the similarities between the books, each storyline has been fresh and engaging and the characters grow and change with their experiences. This level had a great balance of humor, love, real life issues, cuteness, danger, machinations, supernatural elements, surprises, death, hard choices, and morality. The story continues exactly where the last book left off. Carl, Donut, and all their friends are now on level 10 of the Crawl having just survived the Faction Wars. On this level, the crawlers are competing in “simple” races with mandatory eliminations all to arrive at the Parade of Horribles. As in the other books, Carl continues to come up with crazy dangerous plans always surprising and frustrating the Ai. We get more aware NPCs and backstories of various Gods. Crawlers continue to die and the number still in the “game” grows ever smaller. Now the AI is glitching and the rest of the universe is in chaos. And of course, Donut continues to be Donut. I still love the interplay and the connection between Carl and Princess Donut and that Carl’s character is a sweet, snarky, messy, lucky, sarcastic, kind of dumb, angry, and awkward man who regularly screws up which just makes him a very likeable and relatable hero. The story includes what you’d expect from this genre – fighting, dangerous situations, supernatural creatures, evil entities, henchmen, loyal friends, tragic back stories, mystical coincidences, snark, plot twists, death, and laughs. There was once again some light ethical, moral, and philosophical undercurrents which only added to the depth of the story. I cannot wait to read what happens next with Carl and Princess Donut and to see what Carl’s continued plans are to mess up the game. While this could be read as a standalone, do yourself a favor and read the series in order to get the most out of the complex and rich storyline.
Jeff Hayes in my opinion is the greatest narrator bar none. He once again did a phenomenal job narrating the story and characters into life with enough change of inflection, tone and cadence to voice multiple characters quite convincingly. It is impossible to tell this is only one narrator.