Understatement: There is a lot going on as Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl begins. Carl, a Coast Guard vet, is caught outside, in the dead of winter, in his underwear when every man-made structure on Earth collapses. He and the only survivor nearby, a talking cat named Princess Donut, are forced to descend into their rebuilt planet, which is now an 18-level dungeon for a corporate alien race’s reality show — Dungeon Crawler World.
As Carl and Donut make their way down through the dungeon, floor by floor, they have to figure out how to survive, fight, and strategize on the fly. Each floor is different. Each brings new nightmares. But each DCC floor has one thing in common: It’s really, really, really hard not to slam the book shut and wish you could play that level, too (perhaps without the life-or-death stakes – or the denizens rooting for you to fail). We can’t take over your planet and drop you into a dungeon crawler, but we can recommend these games that feel like each currently-published Dungeon Crawler Carl book. Try them out, and before you know it, you might be getting a snarky achievement or risqué reward, courtesy of the dungeon AI.
[Ed. note: This article contains minor spoilers for the main level theme of the first eight Dungeon Crawler Carl books.]
Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl: Lethal Company
Image: Zeekerss
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floors 1-2 – The tutorial levels
Where to play: Windows PC
In Lethal Company, a co-op survival horror game, you and the rest of your disposable crew are stuck scavenging scrap on abandoned moons to boost profits for a corporation totally indifferent to your death. You don’t even get a name! Your name is “Employee!” Both here and in Dungeon Crawler Carl, characters face the possibility of grotesque suffering due to small mistakes, environments that don’t remotely feel logical, and the need to crack jokes to mask absolute panic. The vibe here is that an onboarding and a culling are one and the same. You’ll make it, or you won’t. Your company won’t blink an eye.
Book 2, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario: Baldur’s Gate 3’s Act 3
Image: Larian Studios
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floor 3 – The Over City
Where to play: PS5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X
After the tutorial levels in DCC comes The Over City, an instantly overwhelming ruined metropolis that feels a bit fantasy-Vegas-meets-undead-circus. Everywhere you look, there are side quests, complaining NPCs, and helpful taverns or shops to spend your cash in. Sounds like Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3, no? Act 3, in which you finally reach the city of Baldur’s Gate, is famously very, very overwhelming. There’s too much to do, and navigating your way through the chaos can be stressful – but that’s part of what makes the city feel alive. Also, since Carl and Donut get their class and race change on this floor, what a fabulous opportunity to go all in on a game with a strong character creation system.
Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook: Antichamber
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floor 4 – The Iron Tangle
Where to play: Windows PC
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook begins with a blurb noting that readers are not expected to keep track of the book’s complex subway system. That’s Carl and Donut’s job, not ours. But it’s impossible not to try, sometimes, as you’re dropped into an up-is-down, down-is-up puzzle with monster-laden cars and maps that lie to you.
Antichamber, an exploration maze game, feels like you’re stepping into an MC Escher drawing. There are hallways that wrap around each other. There are spaces that reconfigure every time you visit. There’s a gun that can manipulate, create, or destroy matter. Best of luck with that.
Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods: Tears of the Kingdom
Image: Nintendo via Nintendo Today
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floor 5 – Hump Town and biome-themed bubbles
Where to play: Switch
DCC’s Hump Town is a small desert settlement surrounded by sealed bubbles organized into land, sea, air, and subterranean quadrants. To find the staircase to the next level, the crawlers have to defeat their biome-themed quadrant in a conquer-the-castle kind of challenge. This to me had shades of the most recent 3D The Legend of Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, in which Link has to clear dungeon-adjacent puzzles in watery, volcanic, tomb-like, and wintry vortex environments before heading to Hyrule Castle. This isn’t a 100% match, though: Only one of these experiences features a razor-toothed feral goose boss named Denise. See if you can guess which it is.
Book 5, The Butcher’s Masquerade: Predator: Hunting Grounds
Image: Illfonic/Sony Interactive Entertainment
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floor 6 – The Hunting Grounds
Where to play: PS4, PS5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X
The Butcher’s Masquerade, book 5 in the series, is a Jurassic Park x Battle Royale nightmare. In it, Carl and Donut find themselves in a vast jungle world where wealthy aliens have paid for the privilege to hunt and kill the crawlers for sport! What fun! Predator: Hunting Grounds maps cleanly to this premise. It’s an online multiplayer game where your fireteam of elite soldiers is trying to complete somewhat routine military tasks in a dangerous jungle setting. Inconveniently for you, there’s an alien Predator on the map, too, whose job is to hunt and kill you. (And that alien has a plasma cannon.) Will the Predator get a trophy for eliminating you, or will your squad escape the jungle? Will Carl and Donut survive the Hunting Grounds and make it to the next floor? We now know what happens to Carl and Donut, but the other question is still up in the air.
Book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride: Inscryption
Allow your cage wolf to get defeatedImage: Daniel Mullins Games/Devolver Digital via Polygon
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floors 7-8 – a fairytale maze (that we skip, unfortunately!) and Ghosts of Earth
Where to play: Switch, PS4, PS5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Donut and Carl get to skip Floor 7 (Prepotente, an Italian Boer goat crawler, destroyed it) so straight to Floor 8 they go. The World Dungeon’s Floor 8 is a recreation of Havana, Cuba, but there’s a twist: The streets are familiar, but this version of Havana’s people are memory ghosts. Here, the crawlers are hunting monsters to build into battle cards. It’s very Pokémon, but the psychological horror and card-game theming reminds me more of Inscryption – a roguelike deckbuilder with shifting art styles, sinister NPCs, and escape room elements. Having to sacrifice the weak on your board (e.g., squirrels) to play your more powerful cards in Inscryption hits the same often-bleak, often-brutal chords struck in DCC…where it’s every man (and his cat) for himself.
As a bonus, if you’re looking for that doomed fairytale feel from the skipped floor, try Slay the Princess. Its repeated-death, no-outsmarting-the-maze themes are admittedly tragic, but it’s a gorgeous experience.
Book 7, This Inevitable Ruin: Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord
Image: Taleworlds
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floor 9 – Faction Wars
Where to play: PS4, PS5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is a medieval sandbox game where you’ll be directing an army on a grand scale. When you boot up the game, you’re nobody. But that’ll change after you trade goods, recruit peasants, and work your way up to commanding hundreds of troops through real-time sieges and battles. If you like the logistics of fantasy warfare (think: budgets and resource management), this is your game.
And, for better or worse, it’s similar to the one the DCC crawlers are forced into. In this series, Carl constantly has to manage his smattering of weird inventory items, companions, allies, and sponsors. His life depends on it. On this floor, in a funnel-shaped galactic battlefield surrounding the capital city of Larracos, Carl and Donut lead their own Princess Posse to hopeful victory alongside an NPC army they’ve assembled. (Read The Inevitable Ruin to see how they do.)
Book 8, A Parade of Horribles: Distance
Image: Refract Studios
Where in Dungeon Crawler Carl? Floor 10 – a death-race gauntlet
Where to play: PS4, PS5, Windows PC
Scenario: You’re at the starting line for a vehicular death-race from point A to point B. You can trick out your car, you can employ defensive driving tactics if you want, but you’ve got to stay on the track, no matter what that track does to you. Oh, and definitely don’t come in last. (That’s where the “death” in “death-race” comes in.)
That’s a valid description of the main predicament Carl finds himself in on Floor 10 – and also what you’ll find if you play Distance, a 2012 driving sci-fi horror game. The tracks are Escher-inspired, your car can sometimes fly, you need to dodge casual sawblades and lasers, and it’s set to the most oppressive techno beat you can think of. (With house permadeath rules and your own soundtrack, you could probably have a similar experience with Mario Kart.)
Distance, however, comes with a simmering, slowly-unfolding horror story in the background that suffuses you with dread as you’re driving for your life, which makes it a must-play for A Parade of Horribles readers.
While each game we’ve mentioned here may feel like a specific Dungeon Crawler Carl floor, we can’t leave this without a few honorable mentions for games that feel like the series as a whole. Borderlands, The Outer Worlds, and Enter the Gungeon have similar “corporations grinning while you grind and die for their KPIs” themes, along with the idea that your environment can be absurd, hilarious, and likely to kill you all at the same time.
Related
Seth MacFarlane is making a Dungeon Crawler Carl TV show for Peacock
The apocalypse will be televised