A Review - Carls Doomsday Scenario - Matt Dinniman

Well, I’m tearing through these (audio) books faster than Carl and Donut could tear through a circus full of evil lemurs.

This was an interesting direction to take the story on the back of the first book. Rather than continuing the grim, Dungeon Crawling style to the adventure Carl and Donut find themselves in an open world RPG style setting with a much more quest based approach to progression. I still really enjoyed it, I just didn’t enjoy the setting as much as the first book, hence the four stars. I think it was a necessary change to take the story into themed levels, and doing it before the novelty of traditional Dungeon Crawling wore off will probably prove to be the best approach as I read more of this.

The story still focuses primarily on the buddy species duo of Carl and Donut with some really interesting character development as we go. It’s nice to see the human aspect to both characters as Carl starts to become Jaded with the game and the system, and as Donut shows she’s far more mature than she lets on. Also a special mention of Mordecai, he’s Matt Dinniman’s exposition cheat code and it works really well.

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of insanity that Book 1 does but it’s a solid sequel that shows the direction Dinniman is planning to take things.

I’ll definitely be reading more of these.

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