Fighting Fantasy - Books 21-30

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21. Trial of Champions - Score = 7.7    Tier = Good

Attempts to Beat: 35

A massive list of essential items required? Check. Relentless high skill enemy encounters? Check. Completely unfair "fail one roll and you die" moments? Check. "Mr Livingstone I presume?" Check.

The first thing I noticed when picking this book up was how thin it felt. After confirming that it did indeed have 400 sections, I began play and quickly found out why. The writing here is very brief and there isn't all that much description given to the areas of the dungeon you are travelling. Livingstone does a bit better job in describing the various creatures you encounter, but still this contributes to this book not nearly having the same atmosphere or immersiveness that Deathtrap Dungeon had which is a bit of a shame but maybe not totally unexpected as you can never really go home again.

The story here, while not great, is pretty decent and may be the one area where it has an edge over its predecessor as for all its greatness, Deathtrap Dungeon wasn't that big on plot. Setting up a revenge story, Lord Carnuss, the brother of Baron Sukumvit from that book, wants to show up his sibling by having one of his champions defeat Sukumvit's shinier, newer, and deadlier dungeon. His plan though doesn't really make much sense. He kidnaps you and along with 41 other of his slaves he holds a contest to see who his champion will be. It seems like a hired mercenary might have been a better way to go but so be it. Where his plan comes off the rails is that after winning his arena challenge and earning the right to be his champion, he sends you into the dungeon with no provisions, potions or even armor! Money clearly isn't a problem for him if he can waste 41 slaves and throw a week long lavish party for you. And then he sends you in with just a sword and pouch. Are you just wearing a loincloth? He actually wants you to win right? I think it would have been better had once again you gone in willingly, perhaps even playing as the exact same character from Deathtrap Dungeon to really rub Sukumvit's nose in it. 

A missed opportunity comes in the form of your fellow contestants. This was a great strength of Deathtrap Dungeon and it's a shame there is no similar Throm character you can interact with here. And while the Chaos Champion and Eastern Warlord are indeed pretty badass in their own right, they attack you on sight which really doesn't make them any different from the other denizens of the dungeon. I would think that any contestant would realize it's best to join forces at least until you are almost at the end of the labyrinth which makes their actions seem a bit silly. However, there is a very similar beat that comes across when you encounter a fellow contestant (an elf again as in Deathtrap Dungeon) entangled in a tongue (as opposed to a snake) who provides you some aid in trying to help them even though they die anyway. 

The book's difficulty level is definitely on the high side. This is a continual onslaught on your stamina from high skilled opponents with several fail-this-roll-and-you-lose moments thrown in for good measure. This all feels somewhat unnecessary too as the vast amount of essential items you need to collect to beat the book would have provided for a decent level of difficulty anyway. I don't recall ever fighting close to this many enemies in a book before (I think I had 27 combats on my winning playthrough) so if you love throwing dice (and I do) then this adventure is for you. 

You are definitely going to need a double digit skill score to win this adventure (and by double digit I mean 12). With how important stamina management is in this book, why am I allowed to carry nuts and berries along with me but apparently have no way of eating them? I figured if I decided against giving them to the man in the ceiling then I would get to eat them myself and recover stamina later. I figured wrong. This all being said, much like Caverns of the Snow Witch, I found the book incredibly hard but not impossible. Assuming I made it through the opening arena section (and perhaps this section exists just to weed out low skilled characters who would have absolutely no chance in the dungeon anyway) I found there were 5 encounter spots where I was most likely to die. In the order you come across them, these were:

1) Coldclaw lair. For me this was the most tense area in the whole book (with one possible exception listed later). Here you fight first the Coldclaw at a -1 skill penalty, and then the skill 10 Bone Devil. Just beating them both isn't enough though. I had to ensure I had enough stamina points remaining for the Liche Queen's room. There are no stamina pickups between here and her room and you are certain to lose stamina in her room no matter what you do. It sucks escaping the Coldclaw lair with two gold rings but knowing you are doomed no matter what because you only have 2 or 3 stamina left. As such, I would advise using any luck you have in combat here to conserve as much stamina as possible. 

2) Liche Queen room. This follows from the above and could really be grouped together with #1. I bought it here several times because my stamina was too low thanks to the Coldclaw lair.

3) Chaos Champion. This one is pretty self explanatory. With stats of Skill 11 and Stamina 12 he is the highest skilled opponent in the whole book (what, no Skill 12 Birdman? Maybe that guy should have entered this contest!) and there is a good chance he beats you outright.

4) Siren. Okay, here we get to the exception I mentioned earlier about the most tense areas in the book. As good as I thought the adventure was overall, this has got to be one of the most poorly designed gamebook encounters ever. First off, you must roll one die where a 1 or 2 results in near guaranteed failure. Fail this roll and you are sent to a skill check, which if you PASS the skill check you are dead and if you fail it you get to fight on. Of course, anyone who is able to get this far surely has a very high skill and is almost certain to pass this skill check, thus leading to the insta-fail. It's not so much fun when you roll a 1 or 2 three times in a row upon getting here as I did. Why is this here Mr Livingstone???? It's incredibly dumb sir. 

5) Fire Demon. It's not so much the Fire Demon's stats that are the problem (Skill 10, Stamina 10 is run of the mill for this book) but it's his modifier for his whip and breath that can wipe out your stamina pretty quick with some unfortunate rolls even if you are winning most of the attack rounds. 

To be fair though, if you are able to make it through the Liche Queen's room then the stamina bonuses start hitting pretty regularly which makes the book seem a bit more fair (and without these stamina bonuses I wonder if the book would even be possible to beat). 

The flip side to the above is probably the area of Noy the Trialmaster which eventually becomes a bit on the tedious side. The tug of war contest with the caveman really doesn't make much sense. You are told he is incredibly strong, but then have to roll against his measly Skill of 7 to see who wins? Strange. Next comes a pretty simple math question then a random battle against Noy himself where you just need to use trial and error until you figure out how to beat him. The problem here is once you do, you can then beat him every single time and it just becomes a page flipping exercise.

Also, not that they are particularly tough to find by any means, but I have to wonder, what exactly is the point of gathering the three sets of ring combinations? It seems like all you really need is the third set. If you used this set by mistake when first asked by Lexus the Trialmaster, or if it was the only set you had so you really had no other option, you would just go straight to the "Incredible! You solved the puzzle!" section with Lexus being none the wiser. 

Okay, so why do I grade this book as Good? Simply put, overall I think the design of the dungeon here is great. I enjoyed its layout, the varied and interesting creature encounters, plotting out the optimal (and only) way through and very much enjoyed the hunting down of all the gold rings even if this doesn't seem quite as cool as searching out diamonds, emeralds and rubies. These gold rings aren't all you need to beat the book though. Far from it. There is a plethora of other essential items that you need to track down. The list goes on and on and this surely must be some kind of record for the most number of essential items needed to beat a gamebook. I always love tracking these down and did so again here. So while some of the issues I mentioned in the review above do indeed keep it from realizing its full potential, I still had a pretty good time with it and had that usual moment of triumph that can only come by beating a very difficult book.

Ranking: Not a classic, but still pretty good! I think I would have scored this book much higher had it come earlier in the series. By book #21 I am expecting the adventures to evolve and try new things. Looking at the books preceding this one, Appointment with FEAR and Sword of the Samurai in particular brought a whole bunch of innovations to the table while this one seems to repeat Ian's formula from Deathtrap Dungeon, Temple of Terror and Caverns of the Snow Witch. Admittedly, it's a pretty good formula but it's starting to see the effect of the law of diminishing returns. While I think Trial of Champions was better than Warlock of Firetop, I think Caverns of the Snow Witch has a slight edge on it so slot it in between those two as of now. 
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22. Robot Commando - Score = 6.3    Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 7

So here we are with another sci-fi Fighting Fantasy effort and the plot of this one is strange to say the least. Your land of giant robots and dinosaurs (I wonder if the makers of the Pacific Rim movies took some inspiration from this book's cover) is invaded by the warlike Karosseans who apparently fight with so much honor that their plan is to put everyone to sleep! Everyone except you of course. Why are you the only one left awake? Beats me as it's never explained in any sections I read at least and I have to say this lack of explanation really bothered me. Also, why does your character carry a sword? This seems incredibly out of place in a land of high tech robots that clearly have missiles and guns. I suppose it's so the author doesnt have to worry about devising a system of gun combat for the book but still, it would have been nice to have some reason for the sword (or even just have your character fight with his fists even). There is a heavy Transformers influence going on here in the form of the robots. I mean cmon, take a look at the illustration for section 65.....it's clearly Starscream!!! 

The high point of the book is easily the different robots you can acquire and pilot. There is some good experimentation to be had in trying to find more powerful and powerful robots and what kind of offensive capabilities they can bring to bear on your opponents.The problem though is that there doesn't seem to be nearly as many robot (or dinosaur) combats as there should be seeing as how this is the big hook of the adventure. If the book had perhaps been some kind of robot fighting tournament with lots of different styled opponents complete with backstage intrigue it would have made for a more fun adventure and showcased the combat system more.

The meat of the book has you traveling between 8 cities (unless I missed one somewhere) looking for a way to defeat the Karosseans. This requires you to search for items you can use either to wake everybody up or to defeat the Karossean leader Minos in either personal or robot combat. There is some fun to be had in working out the order you need to do things depending on which way you want to try and defeat the book. That being said, a lot of the cities are surprisingly quite bland with very little to do. You seem to arrive at a city, are given a list of locations you can visit, and then basically just go down the checklist one at a time seeing what each location has. Taking a look at the various cities below:

City of Knowledge- Probably the most interesting city in the book and it's a shame they weren't all like this. The college of medicine, museum, dinosaur preserve, and war college all have some interesting and useful items to find and I think a lot of the things you need to beat the book can be found in this city. I also found the atmosphere within some of the buildings to be quite good with descriptions of you hearing strange sounds in the hallways which was suitably creepy. 

City of Industry- The second best city in terms of things to do with a few useful items and if you want to beat Minos in robot combat then you will probably need to explore here. There also seem to be several "filler" sections here though and looping around in the tunnels area can be quite annoying. 

City of Pleasure- This is considered a city? It's an airfield and an arcade! Considering its name this city is incredibly disappointing. You can pick up a strong robot and a highly useful item here but this city is incredibly devoid of atmosphere or things to do. Oh, you can "play" some games in the arcade if you can call it that. You dont actually play them in the sense that they are a mini-game, you are just told what the game is about and how you did at them. Speaking of which, why the heck is our character stopping to play arcade games considering what is going on? Suggesting a player take time out of the adventure to play some video games probably isn't what a gamebook author should be suggesting in 1986 with the debut of the Nintendo Entertainment System just a year earlier.  

City of Jungle- Another bit of a joke of a city. Hardly anything going on here and does a city of jungle make sense anyway? I guess that means this past weekend I took a hike through the City of Woods.

 

City of Storms- Another dud. You need to go here I believe if you want to pursue the "wake up the population" ending but there is extremely little going on here otherwise.

City of Worship- This city consists of temples and is basically where you go to boost some of your stats (or decrease them if you make the wrong choices). This city was well written I thought and was one of the more interesting ones to look around in. The temple of fear in particular was quite atmospheric. 

City of the Guardians- A very powerful robot here (which I assume is why the city is hidden) but that's it. Move on.

Capitol City- The end game city for battling Minos. Not much of interest here either, just the Sword of State if you want to win through personal combat then on to the final battle with Minos. The final battle itself isn't bad as you will likely require some special items to win (unless you start with 12 Skill) but unfortunately Minos himself is given very little characterization. And also, you aren't Karossean, so would you still be able to challenge him? I thought this would have been for tribe members only.

So, with a few exceptions the cities really are kind of bland. Did the Karosseans really put everyone else to sleep or did your citizens just fall asleep naturally from boredom? To make it worse, you don't even get a sense of travelling between the cities. You pick the next city you want to go to from a list and then you usually just find yourself there on the next section. Are these cities all literally right next to each other? I usually like to draw my own maps but I think a map of the land at the front of the book might have come in handy here as a way to provide some sense of scale as to how far you were travelling. 

As is usual now for the US Steve Jackson's books, there is a good amount of replayability here as you can go back and try to win in the various different ways. The downside to that is it tends to make the book a little on the easy side. While I found this book a bit more difficult than his first two efforts (Scorpion Swamp and Demons of the Deep), this for me anyway was because it seemed like this adventure contained more instant death paragraphs than those previous outings. 

 

I think the book could have benefited greatly from some additional fights. Jackson sometimes even seems to go out of his way to AVOID having any of these. There is one section where you approach a sentry and are told..."Well this is war. You circle behind the hapless sentry-then rush him. Your sword swings silently and he is dead." Um, how about a combat there Steve? You also sometimes have key  choices taken right out of your hands such as being told you steal the Luck Amulet without being given the explicit option for doing so. The writing, while not terrible, isn't very strong either and he seems to have a bit of a problem coming up with interesting encounters. 

Ranking: I found the US Steve Jackson's books to get slightly better with each one but they still never really elevate to the Good level. The positives here are the replayability to try and beat the book several ways and the uniqueness of the adventure along with the very cool ideas regarding the combat of the robots. It's just a shame this robot combat wasn't utilized nearly as much as it should have been. The cities themselves along with the enemies can be on the boring side at times and I put this book smack in the middle of the OK tier. 

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23. Masks of Mayhem - Score = 5.7    Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 47 

So in this book we are tasked with tracking down and defeating the evil sorceress Morgana (not the most original of names there I must say) before she can unleash her twelve powerful masked golems to wreak destruction on the world. It's a little strange that we are the ruler of Arion and yet we set out all on our lonesome with no horse or even one gold piece to our name for such an important quest! I also found it a bit strange that we are told we know nothing of the lands north of Lake Nekros, but as we travel further and further past this point we then seem to know a lot more about the people, creatures and places than we therefore should. Oh well. 

I think I'm going to start referring to author Robin Waterfield as "Captain Insta-Death". My goodness! I mentioned in my review to his previous book, Rebel Planet, that the second half of that adventure descended into a litany of arbitrary instant deaths. Well, he seems to have run with that concept even more so here as the whole book this time is filled with these. Not only that, but the deaths themselves aren't even written in especially creative or interesting ways. It's a pity too because what should have been interesting areas to explore such as Marsh Vile and Morgana's lair just lead to "take one wrong step and youre dead" moments. Game design does not appear to be one of Mr. Waterfield's strong suits. That's not good when you are writing gamebooks.  

In my Trial of Champions review I wrote about the Siren encounter from that book being the worst designed encounter I had come across to date with a 1 in 3 random chance of game over. Not only does Waterfield have a situation exactly like this here in the form of the bush fire (also a 1 in 3 random chance of instant death) but he then additionally decided to say "hold my beer" and chose to implement the alligator encounter. The alligator itself isn't a problem, but once it's defeated you roll two dice and need a 2,3,11 or 12 in order to then obtain an item ESSENTIAL to completing the book. That's egregious!!! Once I had finally worked out what to do, I still needed to make the required rolls to pass the bush fire and then obtain the orb. This took me 16 consecutive attempts alone to finally get past just these two rolls. The amount of dice rolling I did defeating those tentacles at the beginning of the book over and over and over may well have given me carpal tunnel syndrome. Thank goodness I was able to work out the riddle at the end of the adventure on my first time there or I think I might have done harm to myself and my attempt count would have probably gone well over 60. Is it possible for one required roll in a gamebook to scupper a lot of its good work? (The alligator-orb roll in this case as the bush fire roll taken by itself wouldn't have been too bad, it was just adding insult to injury here) Yes, I have to say it is. This comes incredibly close to making the book unplayable. 

So, the positive aspects of the book? The story I found to be good for the most part and while it doesn't do anything terribly original (hunt down and kill the evil sorcerer/sorceress) it's slightly above average for this sort of fantasy trek as it does contain some interesting twists and turns along the way. It also certainly does have an epic feel to it as you travel across and through a quite varied area of terrain. There are plenty of well hidden items to find (that don't require random luck) and that is always a good thing. It took me longer than I care to admit to find the apple seeds but this did give me a satisfactory a-ha moment when I finally did. It's a shame the Golems themselves didn't play a bigger part. They are built up pretty well in the prologue and initially I was hoping to get to hunt them all down in something akin to The Seven Serpents from the Sorcery series. As it is, they only appear in one section and either you have the "Aragorn spectral army" to use on them for the insta-win or you don't and you're dead.

Even though you eventually learn that it's really just a waste of time, the hunt for the Sabre Tooth Tiger in order to obtain the Horn of Hever was for the most part a fun little mini-game if perhaps a little bit too random at times as well. Checking my notes, I decided to take up the hunt on 9 occasions and only actually found him on 2. The Tiger has a skill of 11 so on one of my 2 successful hunts I still had to flee the fight as I found I wasn't going to beat him. If you have a high enough skill to actually beat the Tiger you probably don't need the Horn for the final string of battles anyway. 

The twist whereby you learn from Vashti that this adventure is in fact a trap and that you are being duped was really well done. As was the sigils appearing in some of the illustrations that helped to tie it all together. This did however kind of give away who the traitor was I thought. I mean, you just haven't met all that many people in general so there isn't much of a list to choose from. Ifor Tynin, Kevin Truehand, and Lord Hever seemed to be the only remotely possible suspects and the book itself pretty much tells you it's not Truehand right at the end (and he is also dead at this point anyway).  Oh, and only one of these possibilities was the one who actually sent you on this mission in the first place and the prologue even states that you don't really trust him. Subtle. I think this ending would have worked better had you been provided more plausible alternatives to choose from. And speaking of the ending....what is up with that pathetic final victory paragraph? Not exactly a rewarding conclusion to an adventure with such scope. Pretty weak Mr Waterfield!

Ranking: This would have been much higher without the infuriating random rolls required to win. There is a big difference in a book being difficult due to challenge and a book being difficult due to unfairness. The first is desirable, the second is not. Unfortunately, this effort belongs in the second category. A bit of a shame too because the story has a good epic feel and some nice twists along the way. Overall it's still in the OK tier and Im glad I experienced it despite a pretty high level of frustration. 
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24. Creature of Havoc - Score = 9.8    Tier = Great!

Attempts to Beat: 52

Steve Jackson has done it again. Another masterpiece! Much like The Crown of Kings, this book is such an incredible piece of game design it's tough to know where to begin. Creature of Havoc had a special place for me even before attempting it now because this was the last Fighting Fantasy book I played in the 80's (although not the last one I bought). I use "played" in the broadest possible sense however as I only attempted it once. I remember being overwhelmed by the introduction and then thinking I had to crack the language code on my own and wondered how long that was going to take me. I intended to come back to it at some point but I confess I never thought "some point" would be 33 years later! It was also one of the few books I owned that actually survived until today so it's one I didn't have to repurchase (yay money!).  

The first thing to strike me here (as it did when I first played it oh so long ago) is the massive introduction section. This lays out the history and backstory of the area in which you will be travelling along with providing key biographical information as to the villain of the book, Zharradan Marr. I thought this introduction section was great and could certainly appreciate it much more as an adult as opposed to a child when I just wanted to start playing already. The information regarding Marr in particular is fantastic and he is really set up as one of the ultimate uber-baddies of Fighting Fantasy.

This adventure itself sees you playing as some sort of savage creature of unknown origin who wakes up in a dungeon one day with no idea of who or what he is.  The first time I encountered the Hobbit, Knight and Shaman in the early stages of this adventure I was instantly reminded of a PC game from 1997 called "Dungeon Keeper". Your goal in that game was to defend your dungeon from questing heroes such as warriors, wizards and knights by unleashing upon them the various creatures at your disposal such as orcs, trolls, and of course, bile demons. And I have to say, it was great fun dispatching the heroes you came across in both the PC game and in this book as well (who the heck do these heroes think they are anyway? Arrogant bastards!). Although the dungeon section of this gamebook might need some better security as there sure seem to be a lot of warriors and hobbits wandering around! (Incidentally, isn't "hobbit" Tolkien copyright?)

"What do scary monsters dream of

When they take a scary monster snooze

Do they dream of mauling adventurers

Or Shireela in a form fitting costume"

Playing as a dungeon monster is really a brilliant story choice. So many times as gamebook adventurers we enter these dungeons and ruthlessly slay any creature who crosses our path. But what of these creatures themselves? Do they have families? Hopes and dreams? Are they being held there against their will and just want to go home? The possibilities here are really quite intriguing and full credit to Jackson for coming up with this premise and implementing it in such an engrossing way.

As far as the design goes, the sheer amount of hidden references to locate, codes to decipher, and riddles to solve is mind boggling. These all combine to form an intricate web of such gamebooky-goodness which constantly had me wondering if I needed to re-explore areas I had previously thought I had exhausted in case I had missed some hidden secret. Thus, despite the high number of attempts this book took me, it never got stale. The coded language that you need to find the rules for in order to decipher was particularly fantastic. Once you learn how to decode these jumbled sentences, it's great fun slowly writing them out hoping you will discover a much needed clue that up to now had eluded you. Many of the coded entries also contained some interesting background information that made the world seem even more alive even if they didn't provide you with anything actually useful. I found the coded entry from the Rhino-man in the dungeon in particular to be fiendishly devious. For a long time I was convinced going to the Testing Grounds and finding Legionnaire 29 was essential to victory because heck, you had received it in a coded message! As it turns out though, it's just a red herring. Well played indeed Mr Jackson!

I found the dungeon half of the book to be the stronger of the two halves with all kinds of great encounters such as the Clawbeast, Devourer, Chattermatter, Manic Beast and of course the various aforementioned wandering adventurers you come across. Daramouss, who serves as the mini-boss of the first half of the book was also very well realized. That being said, the second half of the book was no slouch in its own right. It's packed with dead ends but most of them are quite interesting to explore in any case. Grog the Half-Orc, Rosina the seer and Weaseltongue the elf were all very well done and I especially found the Toadmen to be creepy adversaries. The final sections aboard the Galleykeep contain a couple more riddles and puzzles to solve and the tension here is very high because you know how far you have come and how far you will have to travel to get back here should you mess up! That being said, this book took me almost 3 weeks to complete (playing it every day too) but I never got tired of it.

The revelation that some of the other creatures you met earlier (and possibly killed) were your former friends was also a great touch. There is also a separate ending whereby you can choose to serve Marr instead of destroying him and you thus become his war commander. Some players might actually consider this a more successful outcome! The writing in the book I found to be excellent and highly immersive. Jackson does a great job of describing both the dungeon and the overland areas that follow and the creation of atmosphere is something I feel he doesn't get enough credit for. Jackson seems to be known as the "design guy" while Ian Livingstone is the "atmosphere guy" but honestly, I think Jackson is better at both. 

As far as the difficulty level goes, this book is extremely challenging but in a fantastically good way. The combats are not a problem in the least and this is how it should be with your creature being described as extremely powerful. But finding the true path and cracking all the codes and riddles is incredibly demanding but also incredibly fun. The mark of a great gamebook for me is one that upon character death, I can't wait to roll up a new character and get started again right away so I can try something different or explore a new area and this book gave that feeling to me in spades. Heck, even the vast majority of the death sections themselves were interesting and entertainingly written which provides you a sort of consolation prize for losing. And despite all the many instant deaths, I never felt like it was unfair. It was an excellently designed and extremely clever puzzle where you knew if you were willing to put the effort in you would ultimately be rewarded. And rewarded I was with both a great twist ending and a enormous feeling of satisfaction for finally having defeated it. 

So are there any negatives? I can only think of one thing to criticize it on and that would be what I came to call the "killbox" (ie. the corridor containing the Dark Elves). This is a dead end area right near the beginning of the dungeon where once you enter this area there is no escape as all options lead to a death of one kind or another. There is nothing unusual about that in itself as the book is full of these areas. What makes this corridor different however is that you can arrive here through random rolls as your character has not yet gained the ability of reason and therefore cannot yet make decisions about which direction to take. From a story standpoint this is quite clever and makes perfect sense, however this is cold comfort if you find yourself here several times with absolutely nothing that you can do about it. Still, it occurs very early in the adventure so at least you wont have a lengthy run squashed by this randomness. There are also a few do-or-die luck tests you have to pass involving crossing bridges and going down stairs and such but these are nothing new for Fighting Fantasy and thankfully there are a plethora of luck bonuses scattered throughout the book to keep your luck score pumped up. 

In the interest of completeness I suppose I should also mention section 213 which is missing the lead-in phrase that is supposed to tell you when to use the pendant. I have to admit, this did cost me a couple of attempts but I did then figure out to use the pendant here as the section itself is written in a way that suggests something is there. I don't think I came across any other complete dead ends that had absolutely nothing at them, be it a trap or whatever so it seemed like there was more than meets the eye at this wall. Plus, you don't really have much to lose by trying the pendant here anyway. Still, I could see how this could have been frustrating seeing as how the book made clear when you were supposed to be able to use this item. 

All in all, this has to be one of the best examples I've ever seen of "going out on a high note". Because of how fantastic this book is, it makes it truly incredible that to date this is the last gamebook written by Steve Jackson. Maybe he felt he couldn't do anything to top this or maybe he really takes no joy from writing them but still, Id like to think someone this good at writing gamebooks would have found some reasons to keep at it. Because he stopped here however, it feels like we all may have lost out on something as gamebook players. 

Ranking: Not too much to say here really.The best book I've played so far and we have a new #1 in the rankings! Brilliant, wonderful stuff all the way around and a true work of genius.  

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25. Beneath Nightmare Castle - Score = 7.3    Tier = Good

Attempts to Beat: 12

I guess it was only a matter of time before an HP Lovecraft style story made its way to Fighting Fantasy and author Peter Darvill-Evans brings us the first. Although to be fair, the Lovecraftian elements aren't nearly as heavy here as they could have been (and as Im sure exist in some other books) as there are also many straight up fantasy elements at work here as well. It is up to your character in this adventure to investigate why our old war buddy, Baron Tholdur the Margrave of Neuberg, has apparently allowed a force of southern soldiers to occupy his once peaceful town. The soldiers are just the tip of the iceberg though as we are also quickly made aware of strange monsters that dwell in the night, dragging off any unwary citizens who happen to find themselves caught out after dark. So right away we are presented with a mystery to solve which I always find as a great opening to get me hooked (ie. we don't have everything laid out for us in the prologue). 

The design of the book, while decent, really isn't all that much to write home about at this point in the series. It probably doesn't help that it's following the fantastic Creature of Havoc in that regard either. The opening village section can see you visit the wharf, the merchants quarter, or the temple quarter in any order you choose. This provides some good variability and exploration options so I give it points for that. The priest you find in this temple quarter serves as the "Basil Exposition" of the adventure and I found it interesting that you are not required to meet him. Therefore, if you take a route through the book that doesn't encounter him you might never really know what is going on. After this we move on to Neuberg Keep and what I found to be a surprisingly short "dungeon exploration item hunt" as we search for one of the combinations of magical items that we will likely need in order to defeat the book's baddie, Xakhaz. The Potion of Berserk Rage is a nice item to acquire also although if you get the Green Globe and the Talisman of Loth you should be good to go and probably wont need to find anything else. 

As for Xakhaz himself, he is certainly a well done bad guy I have to give credit for that. He was an arch-mage who after being defeated long ago had his soul sealed underground beneath Neuberg Keep. The sorceress, Senyakhaz, eventually determines to try and resurrect him by bewitching your friend the Margrave and releasing him from his prison under the Keep. Xakhaz himself is very well handled as he is biding his time underground while assembling a new body for himself using various parts from corpses (yikes!). The wizard Senyakaz is Xakhaz's right hand "man" and while I thought her character was done quite well, I wish we got to encounter her more often. I would have loved to have seen a lot more backstory on her and perhaps even encountered her a few times before she is finally dispatched. She also wasn't particularly difficult to beat which was a bit of a shame. I also was expecting a whole other area to explore once we pass through her mirror but no, we pretty much go straight to Xakhaz. This is also the second book in a row where the final bad guy is behind a mirror. Once again we can draw a bit of a Lord of the Rings parallel in all this with Xakhaz standing in for Sauron, Senyakhaz for Saruman, and the Margrave for King Theoden. 

A new stat introduced in this book is Willpower and I think this was a missed opportunity. It works very much the same as the Luck stat whereby you are occasionally asked to "test your Willpower" when you witness something particularly horrific. Failure often leading to you going insane. This can often mean that you avoid doing something that could be potentially interesting just for the sake of not having to test this stat and risk a premature end to your adventure. I see what Darvill-Evans was going for here in having some kind of insanity meter (going insane being a typical pitfall in a Lovecraftian style adventure) but the problem is that it really doesn't differentiate itself enough from the Luck stat. Perhaps something akin to the Fear score found in House of Hell would have been more fitting although that very well may have been what the author was trying to avoid. Still, I can't help but feel that something much better could have been introduced for this mechanic. 

There was also a design moment in the book that did kind of irk me. If you fail a very early roll to break through a door, you are then required to fight 6 Swordsmen one after the other. All these Swordsmen have pretty low Skill scores too (why are they so inept?) so this really just results in a lot of pointless dice rolling. Any Stamina you might happen to lose against these buffoons is pretty much immediately restored at the Inn anyway. Gah! 

The atmosphere of the adventure though is what really elevates it. Gruesome deaths abound in this one and that is always appreciated as it provides some entertainment value for failure. Also, in addition to the aforementioned creepy goings on in the town, the Keep itself has all manner of disgusting abominations we need to navigate through. Some of the highlights of these in the book include the man and woman who have a mouthful of tongues (!) and the crate full of human limbs scrabbling about of their own accord. Xakhaz himself is also very disgustingly described (and illustrated). If nothing else, this is the top book for "gross out factor" so far. There is an odd moment though where you can find yourself killing street children which seems a bit over the top even for a horrific book such as this.

This is one of those books where once you know what to do, the path to victory really seems quite short (I fit my whole map on one page which doesn't usually happen with most Fighting Fantasy books) but the fun comes in discovering said path. Overall this is pretty good for a first effort and I'm looking forward to see what Darvill-Evans can do next. 

Ranking: The design, while nothing special, is slightly above average but the Willpower stat was a bit of a waste. The atmosphere however is what brings this book into the Good tier as the feeling of oppression and dread permeates the book with many of the encounters being suitably disgusting or unnerving. I think this one was slightly better than Rebel Planet so it slots in just ahead of that one in the rankings. 
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26. Crypt of the Sorcerer - Score = 0.0    Tier = BROKEN

Attempts to Endure Before Insanity Takes Hold: 60

Are you kidding me?? Is this book for real? Someone must be playing a prank on me surely. This adventure starts out decently enough and seems like it might be quite good. Yes, it's the typical "find the only magic items that can defeat the bad guy before he takes over the world" plot which feels like we have already seen numerous times but that's ok, if the game design is there this kind of story can still make for a pretty good adventure. But then the game design actually reveals itself. If I thought the single alligator-orb roll that marred Masks of Mayhem almost ruined that book I had my eyes opened with this entry on how you REALLY ruin a gamebook. I guess author Ian Livingstone wasn't about to be upstaged in the "ridiculous rolls" department. To run down some of the more egregious ones I came across: 

- Harpoon Flies - So, almost right off the crack we have a random 1 in 3 chance of instant death roll we need to make in order to obtain a key item that is beyond these flies. I hadn't seen nothin yet.

- Clay Golem - Ok, so this guy possesses a gold ring that we need and with stats of Skill 8 and Stamina 9 we should be ok right? Problem is, after each attack round you need to roll one die and if you roll a 1 that spells instant death. It's going to take at least 3 rounds to beat him (and that's if you use Luck and it goes in your favor every time) so roughly 50% of the time you are going to die right here. Ridiculous.

- Hill Giant - Another creature that has something we need so we have to fight him. Before the fight starts however he gets a 1 in 3 chance to kill you outright. Cmon! 

- Ice Ghosts - You need to roll against your Skill three times and if you fail even once you die. Taken by itself that is completely nuts. I will say however that if you made it this far you likely have 11-12 Skill anyway so while this encounter is almost certain death for a lower skilled character they probably wouldn't have gotten this far in any case making this encounter a bit of a waste of time? There are actually a few skill checks like this in the book, I am just highlighting this one due to the 3 consecutive rolls required. The Ghosts themselves were suitably spooky at least.

- Razaak - The cherry on the turd sundae. This fight is just ludicrous. Not only does he have sky high Skill 12 and Stamina 20 stats, but if he wins two attack rounds in a row he instantly wins! Oh and if by some miracle you did happen to defeat him, if you have less than 6 stamina at the end of the fight you still die! Livingstone is just taking the piss at this point. 

And of course there are also the litany of high skilled enemies you have to fight, sometimes in quick succession along with the ridiculous number of endings contained in the final fissure section where choosing wrongly between one of two seemingly acceptable options results in an instant death. Go through the crack or pull the lever? Neither sounded good to me to be honest but I had to pick one purely by guessing and hoping I happened to guess the whim of Livingstone. This kind of thing is really not fun, especially considering what it takes to get this far. Also, why on Earth was the instructions for opening the granite door carved out on a boulder in the middle of nowhere? You know what....who cares! The author certainly didn't. 

Special mention also needs to be made regarding the encounter with the Bonekeeper. I believe you are intended to flat out murder this harmless guy in order to acquire a ring he has that you need to find an extremely useful item later. But if this is the case, why do you lose 3 Luck points for doing so? This repugnant action seems incredibly out of character for our hero. There could have been an interesting moral dilemma provided here if your character knew that the Bonekeeper held an item you needed to defeat Razaak which he refused to give to you. You would then need to decide if killing him was justifiable seeing as how the world could be at stake. But alas, you are just asked out of the blue if you wish to attack him like a homicidal maniac.  

Additionally, there was an early encounter with a group of Goblins that had the same problems as those I had with the Swordsmen from Beneath Nightmare Castle. They are all very low skilled which just results in a lot of pointless dice rolling. Note to gamebook designers....putting in groups of low skilled enemies really does nothing but create meaningless busywork for the player.

So is there anything positive here? Well, the artwork I thought was pretty good (including the really good cover) and the story involving the return of the necromancer Razaak isn't bad, if nothing too original by this point in the series. We get to meet Yaztromo again and are provided with a couple more travelling companions in the form of Redswift and Stubb  Symm and Borri. The thing is though, it wouldn't matter if this was the gamebook equivalent of freakin "War and Peace" story-wise because the infuriating design would have destroyed it all anyway. 

Ranking: I had to invent a new tier for my rankings just for this book. BROKEN! And a broken gamebook will always get a zero. A gamebook that might take hundreds of attempts to beat (if then? I finally had to call it quits after 60 tries) is just insane and if the only way you can beat a book is by cheating, then why I am bothering to play it?  I also have to wonder how this even gets published. Livingstone clearly didn't playtest this AT ALL....or perhaps worse, he did and just didn't care. Either way, this is an atrocious piece of game design and he should be ashamed of himself. Has an apology ever been issued for this travesty? This book goes right to the bottom of the rankings. 
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27. Star Strider - Score = 3.7    Tier = Bad

Attempts to Beat: 14

I really DO want to like these Sci-Fi books but man, they sure ain't making it easy. Here we have the debut book of author Luke Sharp and we get yet another somewhat boring and poorly designed effort. The story setup isn't too bad as we play as a Rogue Tracer (ie. bounty hunter) tasked with rescuing the kidnapped Galactic President who has been taken and hidden somewhere on a ravaged and desolate future Earth. Its definitely got an "Escape from New York" vibe to it but it doesn't go overboard on that premise to the point of plagiarism. The design is another matter though as it is filled with mechanics that seem very poorly thought out.

This adventure adds two additional stats to the usual FF ones. These being the Fear and Time stats. Unfortunately, both of these seemed like a complete waste of time. The Fear stat works much the same as the Luck stat where you are asked to "Test Your Fear" and if you fail you suffer a penalty. All the penalties I came across were pretty light (usually 1 or 2 stamina points) and thanks to the easy racking up of stamina in this adventure due to having no initial caps on your stats, this just seems pointless. This is especially true considering that unlike the Luck stat, the Fear stat doesn't decrease each time you test it. Also pointless is the Time stat whereby you start with 48 hours to find the President and are told to deduct time at certain points as you progress. This could have made for some good "find the optimal time path strategy" such as in Seas of Blood but it fails here because you are given way more time than you will need. In all my attempts I never came close to running out of Time and that included some attempts where I was bouncing all over the place. So, two additional stats, two additional wasted opportunities.  

More on the subject of pointlessness, what is up with the strength/agility tests? In these, you first roll dice to determine the "mark" distance or weight of a required act. You then roll one die and add this to your Stamina and compare this to the "mark" and if your adjusted Stamina number is higher, you succeed. Problem is, your stamina is pretty high throughout the book so these were always easily auto-successes for me. There were also times when I found myself fighting using a vehicle and was told to fight using my Skill and Stamina scores but NOT to deduct from my stamina if hit. Why did my personal Stamina then essentially become the "armor" for the vehicle I was in? This doesn't really make much sense. 

A major problem I have with this book is a similar one that I had with Rings of Kether. That being you can blunder your way to victory without really discovering anything, including either of the two co-ordinates to locate the President in the London Underground. It beggars belief that you are dropped off on Earth having no clues to the President's location, only to then just stumble upon him without having gathered any intel! 

This adventure also has to be one of the worst so far when it comes to arbitrary instant deaths. There are literally times when you are asked if you want to try the door on the left or the door on the right with no info to go on and if you pick wrong....you die. Or you are asked to choose from three different headings in a jungle area and if you pick the wrong heading....you die. (Possibly from having a Gromasaur step on you. Wait...what?). This kind of thing is unconscionable at this point in the series and even a grade schooler would know better than to include such a thing in their gamebook. 

Moving on to more design gems, there are times in this book where you need to roll two dice 4 times and if any doubles come up you are unsuccessful. There is a particular one of these in the final stretch that can be quite maddening as failure results in instant death. Random rolls causing you to fail seems to be an unwelcome theme in these books of late. Give it a rest already fellows! 

This book also contains not one, but TWO of the most boring and uneventful maze sections I have yet come across. The first maze, in the Plaza de Toros area, is just you moving from one room to the next until you find the exit with absolutely nothing going on in any of the rooms. There is an oxygen counter but that hardly seemed to make much difference. Oh, the rooms are all given a different coloured name so I guess that is what is supposed to make it interesting? Zzzzzzz. At least this maze can be avoided unlike the second maze which takes place in the London Underground. Again, there is nothing going on in these chambers save for a couple of doors which not surprisingly lead to instant deaths, until you eventually stumble across the President. As mentioned earlier, the coordinates you can find that indicate his location aren't required and even if you do have them, many of the routes you want to take are blocked off and you have to do a bit of wandering around anyway (which can sometimes result in another arbitrary instant death). 

The inclusion of the Illus-o-scope seemed to be mishandled. Just about everyone has one of these things that can project illusions, so they are certainly a known commodity and seem pretty common. But then everyone seems to use them to create illusions that are blatantly obvious. I mean, you come across a car that has its cab filled with mud and a hand reaching out of it, or a GromPol agents head suddenly grows and its fang filled mouth comes towards you. Gee, I wonder what could be happening? This would be a much more powerful weapon if it was used in a more subtle manner. The final sequence where a missile is disguised as a dragon was a clever use of this technology and it's too bad there weren't more examples such as this. That being said, perhaps Sharp was using all the obvious illusions throughout the book to purposefully lull you into a false sense of security before he springs this final "gotcha" moment on you with the dragon missile. 

For positives, the biggest one is having several paths you can take to get to the final areas which helps to make each attempt fairly unique. I felt the overall plot wasn't bad even if some of the details were missteps. The writing was for the most part passable if perhaps containing a few too many futuristic puns and Sharp does a fair job with his cloak-and-dagger style atmosphere as you never knew who you could trust. None of this is really enough to save this one though as there are just too many pointless mechanics and frustrating arbitrary deaths.

Ranking: A pretty poor first effort from the author to say the least. Too many faults to be considered anything other than bad. I found it slightly better than Rings of Kether due to a better story and atmosphere so it slots just ahead of that one. Still near the bottom of the overall rankings though.  
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28. Phantoms of Fear - Score = 8.9    Tier = Great!

Attempts to Beat: 18

That's more like it! We are back in great territory again as author Robin Waterfield gets one into the classic category. At first glance this adventure doesn't seem like it will be much different from what we have seen several times already from a story standpoint. An evil is springing forth from the land and blighting our beloved Affen Forest. As our village shaman, it is shown to us in a dream that the demon Ishtra is responsible for this and we have been ordained to put a stop to it by finding his lair and defeating him before his evil minions take over the world. So yes, from a very basic plot standpoint this is a hardly original "stop bad guy from taking over the world" quest, but once you get into it you realize its got several unique twists that make it something we haven't quite seen before. 

First off we are playing as an elf character which in itself is unique at this point in the series (at least, I don't believe it's ever been flat out stated in a previous book that you are an elf, but I suppose you could have been in some of the adventures if you wanted to role play them that way). Even better though, we found out we have certain dream powers that not only allow us to gain knowledge and Power in our dreams, but also in the second half of the book allows us to travel in a dreamlike "invisible" state. 

This brings me to the new stat introduced in this adventure, the Power stat. We start with a randomized score for this and can then either gain or lose Power as we make our way through the story based upon actions we take. This includes going over our initial levels. Making wise choices in our dreams for example often leads to us gaining Power while poor choices usually has the opposite result. My favorite moment of gaining Power actually comes from a real world moment when you step out of a forest towards a group of humans and are told "This is the stuff that legends are made of". A bit over-dramatic perhaps, but very cool! This Power score is most important in the second half of the book as we want this stat to be as high as possible in order to aid us in overcoming the end game obstacles. This makes for a really great bit of adventuring as we try all the different paths and options throughout the book to plot out the route that will help us maximize our Power. Really great stuff.  

The replayability and sheer amount of things you can try here is fantastic. You eventually discover that there are two different ways you can try and defeat Ishtra, either by accruing as much Power as possible to take him on in the dream world, or by acquiring half a dozen items scattered throughout the adventure that will allow you to take him on in the real world. After tinkering with both options for awhile, I eventually decided to go with the dream world option for a reason I will explain below but I loved that I had more than one way to try and defeat him. 

The first half of the adventure sees you navigating Affen Forest as you search for the entrance to the pit from which Ishtra's blight is emanating. This part is really well done as you can experiment with different routes and aren't consigned to automatic defeat for missing something. This reminded me of City of Thieves which also did this quite well with its opening city section that allowed you to take a few different paths and still win through. I greatly appreciate (as Im sure most do) a book which allows you to try many different things without automatically dooming you just for going the wrong way. This first half also includes a great melancholic encounter in the form of Eric Rune-Axe, a former adventurer that was driven mad from being trapped in the Maze of Zagor years ago. 

The second half of the adventure also provides for a great deal of experimentation as you can navigate your way through Ishtra's lair either in the real world, the dream world, or a combination of both. This opens up a heck of a lot of possibilities to try in what is essentially a fairly smaller dungeon area. This area also contains a bit of a neat sequence in the dining room whereby you have to really think about what actions to take based on how others will react to what you do and even have to pay close attention to which way you enter and exit some rooms lest your deception be uncovered. Unfortunately, the final battle against Ishtra himself is a bit anti-climactic. If you made it this far you are unlikely to have much problem with him (he actually seemed like one of the easiest dream encounters in the whole book really).

I found the dream combat mechanic itself to be pretty well implemented but it could be a bit on the dry side at times. Because a roll of 2-7 damages you while a roll of 8-12 damages your opponent, this means the odds are against you on every fight and your Skill score doesn't play into things at all (until the last couple of combats in the book for some reason). If you don't start with a Power score that is a decent amount above your opponent you probably aren't going to win. This is why you need to accrue as much Power as possible, so you can basically "brute force" your way through the final dream battles. 

As great as I thought the book was overall, there were a couple missteps. I think one "miss" the book has is the magic system. Here you are occasionally given the option to use a spell such as Finding or Fire at the cost of a Power point. The problem is that you are told for the second half of the book that while you are within Ishtra's domain that magic will no longer work and even in the first half of the book there are barely any places to use it. There are also a couple of spells included in the rules that I dont recall seeing put to use at all. This kind of makes the magic system seem a bit pointless really and I wonder if it wouldn't have just been better to scrap it entirely.  

I also guess it wouldn't be a Fighting Fantasy book lately if it didn't have a random dice roll where failure meant death. In this case, there is a moment where after bathing in a pool you must roll one die. If you roll a 6, it's game over. Considering some of the odds of the rolls in recent books this is actually pretty favorable to say the least. But still, why is this even here? It's just going to rightfully anger someone who happens to roll a 6 and if this roll was just eliminated from the book it would not detract from the adventure in the slightest. Puzzling.

Still on the subject of random rolls, we come to the reason why I decided to go with the dream world route when it came to defeating Ishtra. If you choose to try and defeat Ishtra by obtaining the needed items to take him on in the real world you are required to make a certain roll to open a door that contains a necessary item. The idea is, there are 6 doors and if you want to try to open one you keep rolling both dice until you roll a double. At that point you turn to whichever double you rolled (11,22,33,44,55,or 66). Thematically this doesn't make much sense but the bigger problem is that in addition to containing a necessary item, one of these doors also contains an insta-death. You can try as many times as you like to open the doors but this doesn't change the fact that you have a 50/50 chance of dying before you get the item you need. It's actually a bit depressing that 50/50 odds seems downright generous considering some of the books I have played as of late! Also, why bother making you roll doubles? Why not just have you roll one die, multiply the result by 11 and go to that section? That would cut down on a lot of tedious dice rolling as you try to get a double. 

Oh and don't even get me started on the Trial of Ghosts. This must be one of the most ridiculously random things I have seen in a gamebook yet. It's so random it's even tough to describe. You might as well pick 5 numbers out of a hat, add them up and hope they total the correct section to go to. Thank goodness this section isnt required for victory as that would have really destroyed this book. Maybe Waterfield learned from his alligator-orb roll from Masks of Mayhem on that front. 

Those minor issues aside, Waterfield's writing in this book is really top notch. He does a fantastic job particularly with his dream descriptions as he makes them seem ethereal and mystic while also keeping them decipherable enough that you can tell what is going on in them and glean useful information. He also includes some pretty neat Easter eggs scattered throughout the book as you can encounter Yaztromo or events from Trial of Champions in various dream sequences not to mention an actual encounter with pixies in the employ of the Riddling Reaver. These inclusions don't seem as self-promotional as when they are done by Ian Livingstone himself and are a nice homage to previous titles in the series and they can be fun to try and spot. 

Ranking: Easily in the Great tier overall. The exploring, dream world shifting, hunting down of Power points, and providing different ways to win, along with Waterfield's excellent writing, make this a winner. I enjoyed this a shade more than Temple of Terror but not quite as much as Citadel of Chaos which is why I'm slotting it between those two in the rankings. With a few tweaks here and there though I could see this one going even higher.  
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29. Midnight Rogue - Score = 6.4    Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 4

Great premise....middling execution. This book by author Graeme Davis is a really great idea for a gamebook. We play here as an apprentice to the Thieves Guild of Port Blacksand. Our final test before being granted full membership is that we are tasked with stealing a precious gem (known as the Eye of the Basilisk) from a local merchant. Before doing this however, we must first uncover the location of the gem. We do this by sneaking around the town in the middle of the night, burgling houses and raiding offices to gather clues. A whole adventure in this vein could have been something really great. Unfortunately, that isn't what we got.   

Before getting into what we didn't get though, what this book does introduce is a skill system where you can pick 3 skills from a list before you begin with the various skills then allowing you to do certain things. I found this very similar to the choosing of Lone Wolf kai disciplines from that series. This provides, at least initially, for a great bit of trial and error as you map out the adventure and determine which skills would be most useful to you depending on where you want to go. Unfortunately, as also found with the Lone Wolf books, you pretty quickly learn which skills are the more vital ones and you can even pick up a couple of the skills you didn't take at the start within the adventure itself. The Sneak, Pick Lock, and Climb skills can be obtained by finding certain items that bestow these abilities. This eliminates much of the fun of the trial and error of choosing skills (I would suggest taking Hide, Pickpocket, and Spot Hidden at the beginning and picking up the others as you go). This will give you 6 of the 7 available skills, making the skill checks all pretty much forgone conclusions and the one skill you wont have (Secret Signs) isn't really a necessary one anyway. Again, this is the same problem that plagues the Lone Wolf discipline system and it's a bit of a shame in both cases really. 

The adventure is pretty clearly separated into two halves. The first half is the far more interesting of the two as we have the option to travel to 3 different locations in order to obtain clues as to the Eye of the Basilisk's whereabouts. We can choose to visit the house of Brass (the merchant in question), his office in the Merchant's Guild headquarters, or the "Noose", which is the slum area of town where we hope to pick up some intel from some other unsavory characters. Each of these 3 areas contains one clue that we have to locate in order to be able to proceed to the second half of the adventure. I felt that Brass' house, while not large by any means, was particularly well done as you get to creep around this two storey building with tension growing from not wanting to wake up any of the family members sleeping upstairs (or the servants sleeping downstairs). I have to thank "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe for giving me the inspiration to freeze on the spot while sneaking through Brass' pitch black bedroom!  

There does seem to be a glaring error in this first half of the book though. I found you need to explore the Noose area first because if you don't, you might not ever be given the option of going there again unlike the other 2 areas which seem to allow for free movement between them. This really seems like it was just some kind of editing mistake as it should have been pretty easy to give you the option to go here from any of the other two areas. This can actually be pretty frustrating in your early playthroughs. 

The second half of the adventure seems to just ditch this thief premise though and is really quite a letdown. It's as if Davis got spooked that his thief idea wouldn't hold up for a whole book so he decided to bring it back to standard dungeon crawling fare. It's not even a very good dungeon crawl either I'm afraid to say. After obtaining our 3 numbered clues, we are sent to the entrance to the dungeon itself which is located in the side of a barrow. There is a completely pointless moment here where we need to point a statue in a certain direction from which we have 3 directions to choose from. The problem is, if you choose the wrong direction, nothing happens. You are just told to pick another option with no penalty. Boy, talk about a classic example of section wasting right there. Once inside the dungeon, you find it's extremely linear but it does have an interesting encounter here and there at least. Unfortunately you will probably be able to pass through all the traps no problem as you will likely have most of the skills that allow you to do so by this point so these really don't have a lot of tension. 

The second to last room of the dungeon contains really the only required difficult combat of note in the whole book in the form of the Crystal Warrior. From here we obtain the obsidian disk, which not very originally is used in the very next room to allow us to take the Eye of the Basilisk from its pedestal and lo and behold we have won. At this point, anyone who is anyone in the Thieves Guild steps forth from behind a hidden door to congratulate us. (I was half expecting them all to turn to us and shout in unison....."Happy Halloween everybody!"). So why were they all there? Well, we find that the Eye of the Basilisk is in fact a fake and this whole test was just, well, ummm....a test. This seems like a pretty weak ending. Could they not think of something ACTUALLY valuable that they wanted that we could have stolen for real? Kind of a waste of our time and talents really.  

From a prose standpoint, Davis' writing is passable I suppose but never really goes to anything other than average. From a design standpoint, I wish he had stuck with his burglary idea throughout the whole book. Perhaps giving you the whole night to skulk across Port Blacksand, needing to obtain a certain amount of gold, gems and/or treasures before the sun came up in order to pass your test. Allowing you to ransack mansions, offices, temples and the like while bypassing their various traps and occupants could have been incredibly immersive. I guess that will just have to remain a wish though. 

Ranking: This is at the top end of the OK tier but really could have been so much more, and as such seems like a pretty big wasted opportunity. Even still, I enjoyed it slightly more than Robot Commando (another book with a great idea but middling execution) but not quite as much as Freeway Fighter so in between them it goes. 
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30. Chasms of Malice - Score = 1.5    Tier = Bad

Attempts to Beat: 58

Yikes! Luke Sharp what are you doing? This is easily one of the worst gamebooks I have read yet. The story is yet again another one that sees us sent by a wizard to prevent an evil baddie from taking over the world. This time his name is Orghuz and we must stop him before he can break through the Shield holding him at bay in the underground and arise to take over the world through some form of exponential growth of his followers, the Khuddam. Nothing too original to be sure but not a total flop either. The design of the book however is another matter completely as this adventure seems to have been constructed not with the aim of entertaining the player, but instead to frustrate and anger them as much as possible.    

Lets start with a new combat mechanic introduced in this book known as one-strike-combat. With this, when instructed to engage in this form of combat by the book, you roll 2 dice once for your opponent and once for yourself and whoever rolls lower dies. This is just flat out ridiculous and is probably the biggest contributor to this book's low score (although far from the only contributor). This surely rivals the Hint system from the Cretan Chronicles series as one of the worst design mechanics I've seen. You can eventually find a route that requires only two of these combats (both in the same section!) but still, your odds of making it through this one section alive is 25%. It's incredibly disheartening to begin a new attempt knowing that those are your odds for that part. And even if you do make it through, you will likely be back here again because the arbitrary instant deaths which dominate the final section of the book serve as a truly maddening and highly frustrating double whammy of unfairness.

Turning to the adventure itself, I may be going crazy, but to me there was something seriously wrong with the layout of the opening part of the underground caverns. I would often take a left or right hand passage option only to find myself far from where my map was telling me where I should be based on previous plays. This contributed to the layout of this area seeming nonsensical and extremely frustrating to plot out. One possible "upside" to this though (if you can call it that) is that once you have worked out the best route through the opening area and realize there is really no reason to seek out the Khuddam, you can arrive very quickly at the middle section of the book (where you participate in "The Chase") by taking all the nonsensical shortcuts. 

An example that encapsulates the design problems of this first third of the book is an entire area where you could find a spell that could then be used to bypass a dangerous room full of ghouls in order to continue your quest. Problem is, you could just skip the whole area entirely by turning right instead of left at an earlier junction and not miss out on anything necessary for doing so.

After this near unmappable opening act, we move on to "The Chase" act of the book. Here, we travel down ledges of a cliff as we are hunted by Orcs and Gryphons. It is within this act that the aforementioned one-strike-combat mechanic rears its ugly head. Once you do eventually make it through this part (through nothing but sheer random luck) you then have to deal with the final act and infiltrate the structure that contains Orghuz himself. And good grief this is almost just as frustrating as anything that came before it. A structure riddled with 50/50 choices that can lead to insta-deaths if you chose wrongly? Sure, why not. At the best of times plotting your way through this would be tedious, but because you know you will have to go through that one-strike-combat torture again if you fail, you are left dreading turning the pages to find out if your coin flip decision will go in your favor or not. At one point I noticed Mr Sharp was recycling death paragraphs and I suppose you could use that to your advantage by noting down the death section numbers and avoiding them if you see them as an option. You are going to need every advantage you can get after all. 

Thankfully Orghuz himself isn't too hard of an end boss once you (eventually) make it to him although he is surely one of the most boring bad guys we have found ourselves up against to date. However, even after defeating him the book tries one last time to trip you up by requiring you to identify a traitor among five options. Because it took me so many attempts to get to that point, I had already gathered the required information to know who it was I needed to target. I can only imagine the frustration anyone would have felt being left with a random 1 in 5 option after finally making it that far!   

The ridiculousness of the one-strike-combats and instant deaths could have been mitigated somewhat if the book was well written and had an interesting story. Unfortunately, it fails miserably there too. I've mentioned before that I particularly enjoy the prologues in the books as they often do a great job of setting up your mission and giving you a sense of atmosphere and place in the world. The prologue in this book however is, to put it mildly, total crap. The first time I read it, I had absolutely no idea what I had just read. It seemed to me like a random stream of gobbledygook. The writing within the adventure itself isn't much better. Oh it's not all as nonsensical as the prologue, but it's boring as heck and none of the encounters or environments in the book are really given any sort of atmosphere or life. You are supposed to be travelling underground throughout the whole adventure but you wouldn't know it because from the descriptions you could be in Anywheres-ville. I wouldn't have thought travelling up and through a volcano could be described in such a bland manner for example but darn it, Luke Sharp found a way. There are also lines such as "orcs pull out their evil curved swords" (is it the curves that make them evil?) and at another point you are given a spell that can bring you back to life one time if you run out of stamina, but you are advised to think carefully before you use it (I guess in case death is preferable?). And having your character's occupation described at the beginning of the book as "third assistant rabbit skinner"? Lame.  

There was also a really big wasted opportunity in the form of the Khuddam. Initially it seems like you might have a cool mission ahead of you whereby you need to track down and destroy the 7 individually named Khuddam hidden throughout the caverns. This could have made for a really good "seek and destroy" type quest as you gather clues to hunt these guys and gals down akin to hunting down the various serpents found in The Seven Serpents from the Sorcery! series. Alas, the whole act of seeking them out is rendered totally unnecessary by the time you get to the end of the book. That's what I call ruining probably your best idea for the adventure. 

Probably the only saving grace in the book is your companion, the cat goddess Tabasha. She can aid you by bringing you food and restoring your Skill or Luck stat back to maximum one time per adventure and she generally comes across as pretty cute. However, even she is kind of wasted. You are told that you can use her abilities 9 times during the course of the quest but I never even came close to using that many. I suppose the 9 times you are allowed to use her is a nod to the myth regarding cats having that many lives. Does that mean if you use her 9 times she dies? There is also another mechanic at work here whereby if you have fuel for a fire, you can cook your provisions and thus add an extra 2 Stamina points to your meal. You will die many times in this book, but Stamina loss will not usually be the reason, thus making this mechanic somewhat pointless.

Ranking: Really bad. It CAN be beaten, so at least that's something. Although you really have to be a bit of a masochist to see it through to the bitter end. Even without the terrible one-strike-combats and ridiculously unfair arbitrary deaths, this book would not have been good. But add those in and you get something that never should have been published. I put this one even lower than Starship Traveler as at least that one had some originality going for it and wasnt nearly as frustrating as this. 

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Hall of Famers chronologically from books 21-30

24 Creature of Havoc
28 Phantoms of Fear

2 out of 10 isn't bad I suppose but each successive range of 10 books has had less Hall of Famers than the 10 books previous. Still, this group did contain the new current champion in the phenomenal Creature of Havoc so that's definitely something to take note of.  

Probably what stood out the most from this set of 10 books however was the difficulty level which really shot to the moon! Some of my attempt statistics below:

Books 1-10   -average of 13 attempts per book
Books 11-20 -average of 16 attempts per book
Books 21-30 - average of 31 attempts per book

And that is with using a number of 60 attempts for Crypt of the Sorcerer which no doubt would have been MUCH higher had I kept going. From what I gather some readers from Warlock magazine may have complained back in the day that the adventures were too easy. I have no idea if that actually had any influence on the difficulty level going forward but if it did I wonder if that was a case of a vocal minority getting their way. The first 20 books of the series contain many absolutely classic books and this really seems to have been the golden age for Fighting Fantasy. So the difficulty level must have been getting something right.