REVIEW: This Inevitable Ruin (book) by Matt Dinniman

This Inevitable Ruin is the 7th book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

In this book, it's time for the 9th floor, the Faction Wars, in which the Syndicate corporations and governments can take direct part in the game, fighting against each other and conscripting crawlers to their teams. This time around, however, both the crawlers and the NPCs have their own armies and have a chance at winning as well.

This is guaranteed to be a book of gut-wrenching and emotional developments, as Carl finally gets the opportunity to meet former Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook authors (although he still can't talk about the book, which leads to some confusing moments for his fellow crawlers), and Katia and Donut must finally deal with the consequences of those warnings on the Enchanted Crown of the Sepsis Whore.

As good as some developments in this book were, this is probably my least favorite in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series thus far. I read this series for the individual characters and their journeys, the creative floor setups, Carl's (and others') ingenuity, and the chance to one day hopefully see Carl and Donut take the entire World Crawl system down. Unfortunately, the first half (large chunk? I didn't keep track of when, exactly, things went a bit more back to "normal") of this book was more of a war novel, with lots of troop movement information and larger actions that Carl and Donut weren't necessarily directly involved in. Thankfully, the "war novel" aspects did eventually let up some, allowing the book to get back to the stuff I cared about more, but it was the closest I've come to finding anything in this series to be a true slog.

In one of the earlier books, Carl got a peek at what battles can look like on the later floors, and it was such a titanic clash of combatants that he had a hard time imagining ever getting to that point himself. I'm somewhat concerned that, as the in-game fights get bigger and the scope of everything gets broader, the series will start to lose the charm and fun of the earlier books. Plus, there's the issue of just how dark Dinniman is going to go. I don't really want to see both Carl and Donut die, but I also don't want to see them become broken shells of their former selves like several other surviving former crawlers we've seen.

Crossing my fingers for the next book.