Knightmare

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1. Knightmare - Score = 💀💀 1/2 - Two and a Half Skulls

Attempts to Beat Slightly Difficult Quest: 4
Attempts to Beat Harder Quest: 2
Attempts to Beat Difficult Quest: 2

I thought I would take a break at the halfway point of the Lone Wolf Grand Master series in order to cheat a little bit and return to the 1980's and give the "Knightmare" series of gamebooks a go. I am not sure if you would classify this as an 80's gamebooks series, as the first book was published in 1988, or as a 90's gamebook series, as there were more books from this range published during the 90's than in the 80's. The whole series however is written by the same author, Dave Morris (with the first book also being co-authored by Tim Child), who is one of my absolute favorite gamebook authors, so my expectations for this series are already running high. This is also another series based upon a television show that I have never seen, so I will have no idea how well the books approximate the design and spirit of the show (or if the show was even any good in the first place). An interesting thing to note about these books is that they are broken up into two parts, a short novella at the front of the book, followed by an even shorter gamebook adventure at the back, presumably all relating to the novella. The novella here, despite being extremely fantasy-trope heavy, is actually written incredibly well, making me believe once again that Morris must make for a strong straight-up novelist in addition to his gamebook efforts. The story involves a young Saxon warrior called Treguard, and his quest to reclaim his family castle, which was long ago taken over by an ancient evil force. Along the way, Treguard battles mercenaries, rescues damsels in distress, and defeats dangerous dragons, so yes, nothing really new under the sun here and everything plays out as you might expect. I still enjoyed it quite a bit though, and it got me wondering if I should get back into reading fantasy novels. (An idea I quickly abandoned for now, realizing how many gamebooks I still have yet to play). 

After the novella section comes what I am here for, the gamebook adventure! The adventure itself is only 105 sections, but can sometimes feel like even less, because it is broken up into 3 different quests, labelled: "slightly difficult", "harder", and "difficult". The quests don't appear to share all that many sections as far as I can tell, so you are in essence playing 3 adventures of about 35-40 section length each. The quests are very linear, so while they didn't fly by quite as fast as I was expecting, they are still over rather quickly, and I managed to finish all 3 in one sitting. The adventure begins with your nameless character entering the dungeons of Knightmare Castle, where Treguard himself gives you the goal, which differs depending upon which of the 3 quests you decide to undertake. The slightly-difficult adventure merely requires you to make it to the end of the three-level dungeon alive, the harder adventure requires you to rescue someone who has been captured and is being held in the dungeon, and the difficult adventure requires you to defeat an evil force that has taken up residence on the dungeon's lowest level. And here I have to say, I really found no difference in difficulty between the 3 quests, and in fact failed the slightly-difficult adventure more than any of the others! (Although to be fair that might be because I was still getting the hang of things on that first quest, and made a bonehead mistake or two). 

As far as the game system goes, there is no dice rolling here, as you make your way through the dungeon choosing different courses of action, gathering items, finding one-time use spells, and occasionally solving riddles. There is however a Life Force Clock system, with 3 different statuses you can be at, either Green, Amber, or Red. You start at Green of course, and are told that each time you pass through a gate, door or portal, your status drops down a level. Should you be at level Red when you pass through a gate, door or portal, you then die and it is game over. This whole thing felt like rather a waste though and an exercise in pointless bookkeeping, because I was frequently told to restore my Life Status back to the Green level, usually for correctly choosing an option or solving a riddle. 

The other thing is that in this adventure, just about ANY wrong move leads to instant death, so that you hardly have time for your Life Status to drop to Red anyway. And although I did find a few moments where I thought you were asked to make a choice with little to no info to go on (should you run or sneak comes up a couple of times), with choosing incorrectly leading to death, these moments were thankfully not the majority of choices, and I did appreciate how some thought needed to be put into most of the decisions you make, so the options (mostly) don't feel like a complete guessing game and thus an exercise in pure trial-and-error. The riddles too were rather good, although when you answer one it does not lead to a hidden section number like in most gamebooks, but rather you are asked a riddle, then need to turn to the back of the book to find out whether you selected the correct option or not, which may see you inadvertently catching a glimpse of the answer to a riddle you have not yet encountered if your memory is good enough to remember it later. 

Very interestingly, the rules also contain something called the "Adventurer's Code", which is a list of rules meant to guide you. Some of these are to be expected, such as "avoid killing whenever possible", but others probably gave away a little too much. For example one of the rules tells you that when confronted with a choice between going left or right in the adventure, with no other information to go on you should always go right. (I suppose because you are "righteous"?) This was one of the situations that lead to my first bonehead death in the first quest, when upon coming to such a choice I immediately chose to go left, and was promptly killed. What can I say, the old gamebook-trope of "always go left" burned me here. (Is this really a thing anyway? It would be a massive undertaking, but I wonder if an analysis was done between left-and-right choices in gamebooks, if the results would turn up anything other than a close to 50/50 split between positive and negative outcomes). One of the other rules in the Adventurer's Code mentions never to pick up any weapons, as they are likely evil traps laid by the enemy. This is where my next bonehead failure occurred, as despite having read this rule earlier, I completely forgot about it and couldn't resist picking up that cool looking weapon I came across when asked to choose from a list of items. It was at this point I realized that the Adventurer's Code was no joke, and decided to pay much stricter attention to what I was doing, having previously thought this would be a much easier light-hearted romp of a quest, being as short as it was. Even so, there were still a couple of times I answered one of the riddles incorrectly or chose to employ the wrong item or spell (which again, means instant failure), so that I did not beat any of the quests on my first try. 

It may be a function of the shorter-form adventure and the smaller sections themselves, but this did not seem up to the usual standard of Dave Morris' writing, although I do not know how much was written by Morris and how much by Child. There really is not much atmosphere within the dungeon, and I found myself travelling through a series of rather bland and randomly connected tunnels and caverns. This stands in stark contrast to the novella, which WAS very well written, so maybe my thoughts on the writing of the gamebook adventure are tainted by playing it immediately after reading the story. I will say that the one exception to this in the gamebook portion were the death sections, which were often entertainingly written. I also did find the challenge level here to be just about right for these shorter adventures too. I additionally noticed that there is no book number on the spine, so I wonder if this was originally intended to be a one-off before it was expanded into a series.    

Ranking: Tough to know what to make of this one. Providing 3 separate quests packs a lot of content into a 105 section adventure, and solving the puzzles in order to pass through to the next level of the dungeon was fun enough. However, the 3 quests all seemed incredibly similar, the Life Force Clock system is a waste of time, and the near complete lack of story to the quests themselves (not talking the novella here) really hurts it. I have no idea how well it all approximates the tv show it is based on, but as a mini-gamebook it is solidly middle-of-the-road. My original intention was to read and review the novellas in each book as well as playing the games, and even though I did indeed do that with this first book, I think that moving forward I will be skipping the novellas and just playing the adventures. There could very well be some information contained within the novellas that aid in playing the adventures, but I will cross any of those bridges when I come to them. as reviewing fantasy novellas is not really why I started the blog. And although I was probably expecting more, being that this is from Dave Morris and all, the series is off to a decent, if unspectacular, start.