This is the book that finally made me fall out of love with this series.

There are so many issues with this book but let me try to summarise the main ones;

The train system: Even the five star reviews of this book complain about the train system, but somehow brush it off as if it didn’t matter. A good chunk of this book goes into explaining the train system and how it works as it is clear it will be important in the climax of the book; this meant that I thought about how the system works and tries to reason about it, but it is simply too complicated, to the point where the author himself makes reference to how silly and complicated it is, hoping that the person in charge of the level design for this floor is not in charge of the next one as well, which, of course, he is.

The design is overly complicated, tedious and unenjoyable for the reader, regardless of if it is acknowledged or not. Pointing at your own work and saying: this is awful work, does not make it any less awful. Normally when authors mess up this badly they would rewrite the parts of the book that did not work but Dinniman knows his audience are not around for his writing or worldbuilding chops, so he got away with it; it was my fault for expecting more.

Characters: In this whole book only one character grows: Katya. This is at least partly because the book contains so much filler because of the type of book it is and because of the overly complicated train system. Most of the interesting characters are doing other things on the floor and the only ones Carl interacts with are completely stereotypes and tropey beyond belief, presumably because they are easier to write.

The mystery: Let me save you the trouble; nothing you actually care about gets resolved here. No plot threads are tired up, unless you count a minor one that only reveals itself to be a huge plot point in this book itself. It’s more of the same, more adding questions and less revealing answers and if this were a Sanderson book I would give him the benefit of the doubt that he would tie them up in the end, but with newer authors it is hard not to be a little anxious about whether that will happen.

Combat: The variety of combat in this book usually boils down to Carl deciding to blow things up a different way or something interesting happening on the train. It is not particularly smart or thought out except for one climactic scene; I don’t mind this but so much of the book is combat that it ends up being very dull. Perhaps I’m tired because this is the third book and because it moves so slowly. Dinniman has obviously made a choice to do one floor per book going forwards and whilst I understand this from a monetary perspective, I think it often leads to filler – as seen in the isekai and portal fantasy that inspired this book – such as the train system in this one.

Summary :
I do still have hope for this series as a whole but this book was a painful read. The dungeon was overly complicated and just served to confuse the reader and take them out of the worl; it feels insulting that the author even acknowledged it within the book but did not care to read it and instead tried to hand-wave it away with a joke or two. The rest of the problems from this series remain but if you’ve made it this far then you either like or have learned to accept those parts of this series. For me I don’t trust that the questions I have will be answered and I am not sure if I will keep on reading to find out; I’m at least going to take a break from these books for a while.