This isn’t a great book.
I’m not sure what happened, but the quality of writing is a shocking regression from Dungeon Crawler Carl. The story is boring, I have absolutely zero interest in any of the characters, and the humor is per-adolescent fart-joke stupid (haha! butt plugs!).
This seems like it might have been an early career attempt at setting the stage for DCC (gamification of genocide by super powerful aliens), but without insight or wit.
Travis Baldree is an unfortunate choice of narrator for an already weak story. Travis is not a voice actor: he’s a guy uses different voices to express exactly the same nasally teenage ‘my parents won’t buy me a pony’ angst. He lowered a weak story to “I hate this”.
I wanted to turn this one off after the first couple of hours…but it’s Matt Dinniman and I hoped it would get better. Speeding the audio way up helped the irritating narration, but this book never recovers.
I hope this was just a really old story Matt pulled out to satisfy a publisher, and is not an indicator of future writing style. This was painful.