REVIEW: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (book) by Matt Dinniman

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook is the third book in Dinniman LitRPG Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Carl and Princess Donut have made it to the fourth level, "The Iron Tangle," with Katia, a lost member of Hekla's group, temporarily added to their party. A few differences between the fourth level and earlier levels: the whole level is train-themed, for unstated reasons no one can go to the next level early, top crawlers (like, for example, Carl) have bounties on their heads, and crawlers can now get sponsors.

The Iron Tangle is a complicated mess of train lines. In order to make it to the next level, Carl and his party members are going to have to figure out how the lines work, how to make use of the trains, and what special tricks the Borant Corporation has worked into the whole thing.

Man, this level was complicated. An author's note at the start told readers not to worry too much about all the platform and line details, and that there would be a map near the end of the book that would help clarify things. The map didn't really clarify things, at least not for me, and it really only covered a very small part of the overall picture. I kind of wish there had been an additional drawing of whatever Katia did a while later to understand the level's true structure.

Even though I had some trouble following along with the bigger picture, I still enjoyed the journey. The fourth level felt more claustrophobic than even the previous levels, due to so much happening on either train platforms on in the trains themselves. For most crawlers, it didn't seem like a very good setup for getting further leveled up - there was a bit more emphasis on puzzle solving than on battles, and there were an awful lot of monsters that didn't actually provide a lot of experience points.

An in the previous books, the balance between the quirky, humorous moments and the more serious aspects worked well for me, although there were a few times when I wished that the characters had had just a little more time to emotionally process what they were going through (because I wanted to process it with them). But no, Carl and friends had trains to go catch. And derail, hijack, reroute, etc. 

There were some truly tragic NPCs in this one. Growler Gary, oof. That's some atomic level PTSD potential right there. And yet there were also some really nice moments. Prepotente, ha - Dinniman is almost certainly going to give that character more page-time, and I'm looking forward to it. I also really liked that most of the crawlers Carl encountered in this volume were willing to work together to help people survive. 

At the same time, betrayal is definitely part of the game, with certain items and some gameplay mechanics encouraging it. I kept thinking about Squid Game and the way it switched from cooperative to more competitive games. It made me worry about what Carl and Donut might encounter in future level setups.