two books into dungeon crawler carl, i think my favorite part of the whole video game schtick is how the whole inventory system essentially functions as a form of... what i can best describe as brute-force foreshadowing? whenever they go over their rewards from a big fight or something it feels i'm watching anton chekhov pull out a bunch of guns, hold them up to the camera, give a quick but comprehensive explanation of how each of them works, and then hang them up on the wall until you're left staring at chekhov's armory trying to guess which one's going to go off first only for carl to save the day with a random piece of rebar he innoculously picked up like fourteen chapters ago instead. it's taking the usual video game randomness of accumulating assorted loot and junk and then giving it purpose through the audience's understanding that this is a constructed narrative and that every single piece of loot and every single tooltip had to have been intentionally placed there by the author, while also using that understanding as a vehicle for misdirection by flooding the reader with so many obvious plot devices that the surprises are able to hide in plain sight.
















