Quick-take: Carl is getting repetitive.

Dan's Review

Carl's adventures continue on the 3rd floor.

The third floor takes a modest break from fighting when Carl works through what race and class he wishes and then emerges into the 3rd floor to find a large city. Here he accidentally picks up a couple quests.

This is an interesting series. I am just not sure if I want 6 volumes of it. I think what bothers me is that Carl never makes a mistake. The book has some reasoning for that with a guide helping him, but it doesn't work for me. Even when I know what I am doing, I get killed all the time whenever I play an RPG. I understand that can't happen here. Carl must survive for the story to progress, but he is playing the game like a super expert while pretending he is just a guy stuck in a dungeon crawl.

We get more insight into the dungeon overseers. Carl is breaking all the records and becoming a bit of a celebrity among the viewers of the crawl. He leveraged that to his advantage in a completely unbelievable turn of events when fighting a boss. It was pure 4D chess that could only have worked with some deep inside knowledge. However, Carl's speech is basically, "I get the feeling that... " "I am assuming that...". He doubled-down on his bet, and all his assumptions worked. I didn't believe any of it.

Score 4/5. Here is where I exit the series, at least for now. I'll slide book 3 back into my list whenever I join Carl as he pretends to be new to this dungeon.