Prince of Shadows

                                                          RANKINGS

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1. Mean Streets - Score = 5.8   Tier = OK

Sections: 232
Attempts to beat: 7

Time to "take it to the streets!". The Mean Streets that is, with book 1 of this short two book series from authors Gary Chalk and David Kerrigan. Right off the top, this gamebook might have the shortest introduction I can recall seeing. We get one short paragraph to set the stage for the story of the adventure, and then that's it, and it's right into the rules after that. That one paragraph does get to the point though, and we learn that we are playing as Prince Edrix, who has been in hiding for over a year after his family was overthrown by the usurper Luko, who now rules over the city of Salos with an iron fist, using barbarian guards and his own secret police to strike fear into the populace. (Is it just this city he rules over? Does his grip reach farther than this? Is there a whole country here? Who knows!). Anyway, being in hiding, we have taken on the name Dermik, and have found employment as an actor among a troupe run by someone called Master Melfi. No real goal is stated in this introduction, and I can only surmise that we will need to overthrow Luko, and so from here we move on to the rules.   

As far as the game mechanics go, you generate a starting Strength score by rolling a 10-sided dice 4 times (with a zero counting as a 10) and adding up the results. The minimum starting Strength score you can have is 20, as the rules tell you to bump it up to that score should your 4 dice rolls have totaled lower. There is also a Random Number Table Table of Fortune provided near the front of the book, where you can close your eyes and point at a random number on the table to see what you get, which is very "Lone Wolf"-like, which probably isn't surprising seeing as how one of the authors here, Gary Chalk, was an illustrator for many of the "Lone Wolf" books. However, the "Lone Wolf" comparisons don't end there, as you also get to select 4 different Skills from a list. The Skills are broken into two categories, "Princely Skills" include: Persuasion, Marksmanship, Fencing, and High Tongue, and "Street Skills" include: Thieving, Tumbling, Disguise, Streetfighting, Gutter Speak, and Orientation. A dice roll determines how many of your 4 Skills can be chosen from the Princely Skills list, and you then fill in your remaining Skill slots from the Street Skills list. Good stuff here on the surface at least, and I often enjoy experimenting with options such as these. 

And then we get to the Combat system, which in my humble opinion, kind of stinks. First, you need to calculate the odds of you hitting your enemy, which you do by adding together your Strength score and the value of the weapon you are using, with the various weapons you could have listed in a chart in the rules section (a dagger gives +7, a sword gives +9, etc). You then get to add any bonus you might have (the Fencing Skill gives a +25 bonus if you are fighting with a sword for example), and then finally subtract the value for any armour your opponent may be wearing, and the different kinds of armour and their values are also listed in the rules section (leather armour, chainmail, etc). Once you do all this, you will have the number required to hit your opponent, except it is given in a percentage form. So if your number to hit your opponent came to 34, you would have a 34% chance of hitting them. How do you find out if you are successful? Well, you roll your 10 sided dice twice, with the first number representing the first digit of your percentage, and the second number then gives you your second digit, and you need to roll equal to or lower than the to-hit value you calculated earlier. So in the above example if you roll a 6 and an 8, you have a 68 and would have missed. It probably goes without saying that in the vast majority of cases, the second dice roll is rendered meaningless, and you will know whether you will hit or not after the very first roll. You similarly repeat all the above for your opponent, calculating the value they need to hit you. This is a pain in the ass, mainly because you need to flip to the front of the book to find the value chart for weapons and armour every time (until you start to memorize it, or just eventually write the damn thing out on your character sheet). Is there a reason the values of your opponents equipment couldn't have been listed in the section containing the combat? 

It gets worse though. Should you hit your opponent successfully, you then subtract your weapon value from their Strength, and they then continue on with this lowered Strength factored into their to-hit calculation. This means that the to-hit value is constantly changing, and it also means that whoever gets the first one or two successful hits in has a large advantage, all other things being equal. You may also find yourself in a ridiculous situation where both you and your opponent lower each other's Strength value sufficiently enough so that both of you now have very low to-hit values, and you then both flail about wildly, continually missing each other. You also will usually have the option to run from a Combat, with the proviso that your foe will get to take one final swipe at you as you flee. I found it was always better to just run from a Combat as soon as you could, as none of your opponents had anything key to beating the adventure, and I didn't want to risk a few bad dice rolls causing me to lose all my Strength, which equals death and game over. Thankfully though, the adventure is much more of a stealth-based quest than most I have seen, and with your character being both a prince and an actor, it would make sense that they would avoid combat whenever possible. Oh, and you also are given an amount of money to spend during the quest, (and the section of the rules that talks about money gives a bit more background information as to what life in this world is like), with your starting amount of money being "2 Ships and 40 Smecks". Who comes up with these names? 

You then begin the quest by setting out from your boarding room to just enjoy a day off in the city of Salos, but quickly learn that the city's Secret Police may be aware of your existence, and are currently stopping people in the street, checking them for the moon shaped birthmark that the prince is known to have on his shoulder (and which you do). At this point, you decide to join up with the Resistance movement within the city, and so attempt to make contact with them, hoping to join with them in their attempt to overthrow Luko. This then leads to a stretch involving exploring seedy taverns, never knowing who you can trust, before eventually finding the Resistance and revealing to them who you really are. They are suspicious of any member of the nobility, but agree to let you prove your worth to them by aiding them in a mission they have planned. They intend to create a diversion near the Citadel, which will thus draw out the guards, allowing you to sneak in to the nearby Repository and locate a special Horn, which is known to be somewhere inside. You are then to make your way to the roof and blow the Horn over the city at daybreak, which will hopefully inspire many of the citizens to join in overthrowing Luko. Now, is it just me, or does this sound like a pretty shitty plan? The Resistance overall actually seemed rather inept, as you, an outsider, not only find them rather easily, but their hideout is infiltrated and their leader is murdered almost immediately after you make it through their door, not to mention the spies they apparently have in their midst. I'd think twice about joining these clowns!   

The adventure attempts to do something a little different around the halfway point of the quest, when you find yourself leading a group of Resistance fighters through a maze of back-alleys while being pursued by city guards. The book does this by providing a large map of the alleys you are running through, and tells you where on the map to begin. From there, you need to trace a route through the maze, and turn to any indicated section number should you come across one. These sections normally involve you having to either fight or sneak past some guards, and if successful, you are told to return to the map and continue on from where you left off. Not a bad idea in theory to try and add some immersion, but the map itself does not have much of interest going on in it, and I started to wonder why they even bothered, and maybe it would have been better to have it as a typical gamebook maze that allowed the player to map it out for themselves (something I always love doing). I will give them points for trying something here, even if the execution really didn't turn out all that great.

  

I had the Benny Hill "chase" music in my head as I was leading the Resistance through that maze.

Getting into the back-half of the adventure, and up until this point I was finding the book rather easy. Combats were few and far between, and not having a particular Skill when asked usually just led to a detour of some sort rather than outright failure. That sure changed near the end of the adventure once you make it inside the Repository though, where just about any wrong move leads to instant death and game over. Instant death sections don't normally bother me, as I usually see them as part of "the deal" when it comes to gamebooks, here though I got a bit frustrated a couple of times with just how random some (but not all) of them felt. Once I had used trial-and-error to determine the proper Skills to take, and what the correct choices were on the do-or-die 50/50 questions, I was successfully able to grab the Horn and sound it over the city. The adventure doesn't end there though, as you still need to escape the Repository and meet up with the remaining Resistance members to continue your goal of overthrowing Luko, which presumably will pick up from here in the next book.  

For awhile I was starting to think this gamebook might be another "Starship Traveller", in that I thought it might be possible to beat it without ever touching the dice. This isn't quite the case (at least I never found a way to avoid combat completely), however it still comes VERY close. On my winning playthrough I found myself in a whopping two combats, and even those I found it better just to flee as soon as possible, so that I only ended up fighting for a couple of rounds overall total. Now, not having combat in a gamebook is perfectly fine, and it even makes sense in an adventure such as this where you are playing a more stealth-oriented character, however I think it then needs to implement Skill checks in the form of dice rolls against your stats to overcome obstacles. The way this system is set up though, you are routinely asked if you have a particular Skill, and if you have it you pass, and if you don't you fail. Even this might have led to some great experimentation with the Skills, however with several of them seeming rather weak or rarely asked about, it shouldn't take too long to zero in on the more key Skills to select.

The adventure itself is also more "grounded" than many fantasy quests, and for a time I thought this could easily have been set in a real world medieval city. But then of course the authors couldn't help themselves, and had to throw in some dwarves, fantastical bee-creatures, and a talking chalice(!) into the adventure as you get closer to the end. The city does have a nice gritty feel to it, although the sections of the gamebook are often on the shorter side, so its tough to get a completely in-depth immersive feel going on here. There is a large map of the city of Salos at the front of the book which could have helped in this area, however I found the very high-up "birds-eye" view of the city shown on the map worked against it, as it does not provide nearly the amount of detail I would have liked to have seen. The writing itself doesn't help much either, because as mentioned, the sections are often very short and provided very little in the way of characterization. 

Ranking: I liked the emphasis on stealth and the more realistic (for the most part) urban setting, but the gameplay is quite lacking here. The Combat system is not good, and winning mostly comes down to using trial and error as for what Skills you should take so that you can pass all the more important Skill checks of the adventure. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I was shocked at just how far you can make it through the adventure before you ever need to touch the dice, and even then you only need to pick them up a couple of times. Some of the random deaths were also rather frustrating, although this was mitigated by just how fast you could get back to the point in question and try something else. And while I did enjoy the setting, the story itself is already fading from memory just a day or so after finishing it, and I didn't feel as though I learned all that much about my character, or any characters for that matter. Overall this is a so-so adventure, enjoyable enough to get a passing grade, but not by all that much. I wonder if the second book will up its game (literally).

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2. Creatures from the Depths - Score = 6.3   Tier = OK

Sections: 223
Attempts to beat: 5

Book 2 begins with our Prince Edrix character in pretty much the same place he was when we started book 1, which makes me wonder what I actually accomplished in that adventure. If there is a difference, it is in the fact that you are now already a member of the Resistance seeking to overthrow Luko, but other than that, the sounding of the Horn at the end of book 1 does not seem to have done much, as Luko still rules unchallenged in the City of Salos as he did before. This time however, the Resistance has a much better plan to knock Luko down a peg and harm his standing with the other city-states in the region (which I only just learned even existed here). It seems that Luko has arranged himself a marriage to the Princess Sebbra of Arkis, which would give him a powerful ally in the form of that city-state, and also legitimize his rule. Well, we can't have that now can we? No sir! Thus, a plan is formed, with the Resistance intending to kidnap the Princess when she arrives in Salos, which will no doubt enrage her father, who would then likely call off the wedding and withdraw any future support for Luko. The Princess is expected to arrive in Salos at any time (and in fact, her ship arrives at Salos harbour right as you are having your meeting to discuss the plan), so you and your band of rebels will need to act quickly.  

So just how do you intend to kidnap the Princess? Well, here is where the book shines, and it is the main reason why it is better than the first adventure, in that it gives you 3 different possible courses of action to take as to how you want to go about nabbing her. You can try to abduct her while she is still on her ship, try to do it while she is in transit in her carriage toward a local temple to give thanks for her safe journey, or you can wait until she is inside the temple and try to kidnap her from there. This allows for a nice degree of replayability in trying the different options, and even if you succeed in beating the adventure, there is some incentive to go back and try it again using one of the other plans. But of course, the authors don't even get this right because, get this, which plan you take is determined by a random dice roll! Why?? Why do this?? I would really love to hear an explanation from the authors as to what was going through their heads to make them think that having the most important decision of the whole adventure taken completely out of the hands of the player was a good idea. Now, to be fair, if you happen to have the Persuasion skill you can overrule the random dice roll and decide the course of action for yourself, but this is a fat lot of use to someone carrying over a character from the first book that does not happen to have that particular skill (such as myself!). Oof Marone! 

Anyway, I found all of the routes to be fun for different reasons, although you can easily find yourself unwittingly shuttled mid-plan from one of the routes to another without really desiring to do so. You will eventually uncover a route that sees you capturing the Princess (or rescuing her if you prefer, as predictably you learn that she does not want to marry Luko and is willing to do anything to avoid that fate), and the paths all then converge on an underground section of the adventure where you make your way through the sewers in an attempt to avoid Luko's men and make it to the coast. Any pretense of gritty realism that the first adventure may have begun with is long gone here, as we get a rather lengthy sequence involving a necromancer and his skeletal warriors. Once you escape the sewers, the adventure concludes with one final sequence involving a shell-game as both Luko's forces and your own attempt to outwit each other during what is supposed to be the ransoming of the Princess back to Luko for a large sum of money, and this includes an amusing confrontation where you shut your eyes and fire a crossbow blindly while trying to hit your main adversary of this quest (which unfortunately is not Luko himself) as he attempts to blind you with magical light blasts. Once this is done, it's mission accomplished, and the Princess hightails it back to Arkis, vowing to help you in the future when you require it.    

The game system here is unchanged from the first book, however one thing I forgot to mention in the previous review was that this series also includes a backpack haversack inventory system, whereby you have space in your pack for 5 items, with the idea being that you will need to think carefully about what to leave behind and what to take with you. (Remind you of any particular series?) Unlike that other series though, this is the second adventure in a row where I don't recall ever having to make any kind of decision about it at all, and I always had enough room to carry what I came across. Another thing to mention is that in both of the adventures now I have read sections where I am told I can equip myself with a helmet that I have come across should I desire. The strange thing is, a helmet is not one of the items listed in the armour chart at the front of the book, so I'm not sure if it was meant to convey any benefits? 

Not only did I find the story in this book to be superior to the first, but I thought the writing was slightly better as well. I say slightly because there is some atrocious dialogue between Edrix and the Princess here, but on the positive side I did think your Edrix character was infused with a bit more personality than in the previous quest. The individual sections also felt longer to me here, (but I am not going to do a word count to find out), and the atmosphere of Salos itself felt more fleshed out as well. There was even some humour here that I rather enjoyed, particularly a sequence where you and the Princess make an escape from a group of guards by jumping in a coffin (with its occupant freshly dumped out into the street right in the middle of his funeral procession), and then riding your way down a wet sloping street like Clark Griswold tobogganing in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation",  albeit not quite as over the top as that particular movie. I much prefer this type of humour as opposed to non-stop puns or situations that have to be contrived in advance just so that it can get to a specific punchline the author had in mind. I will say I found the title of the book a bit odd though, because what of the "Creatures from the Depths" of which the book is named after? They do appear yes, but barely so, and seemed to have such little effect on the adventure that I am quite surprised the book was named after them. (And I hope that the "Creatures" in question are not the reanimated skeletons mentioned earlier, as that would be a big letdown, even though they appear to be the ones pictured on the cover). Maybe "Kidnap the Princess" wasn't a title they wanted to go with? There were hints that these strange underground dwellers were intended to play a larger future role in the overthrow of Luko, but as this is the final book in the series, I guess we will never know. I did also mention in the previous review how the provided map of Salos was too "high up" for my taste, and well, that map has certainly not improved in this entry. I used the phrase "bird's-eye" view in that review, but this is more like "satellite-view". 

Can't you just feel the immersion? 

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that this book contains one of the more brutal publishing errors I have seen, as there is a large swath of sections that are completely out of order. I don't mean to say that a few of them or mis-numbered or anything like that, but that sections 42 through 64 are physically bound into the book in the wrong place, and have been removed from where you would think they would be, and placed after section 130 inside the gamebook instead. I wonder if this is just my copy of the book that contains this botch? Although that seems a strange error to happen to just one book. I tried not to hold this against the score of the adventure itself, but still, it was something of a pain in the ass to routinely find myself flipping towards where a section should be, only to then have to go hunting somewhere else in the book to find it. This mistake leaves a poor impression, which is a shame, because otherwise these are incredibly nice looking and large sized (if thin) gamebooks, whose appearance is comparable to the similarly very nice looking "Fantasy Questbooks".   

Ranking: Better than the first book for sure, but I am left with a lingering feeling that these authors don't know how to get out of their own way at times. They will introduce a good idea one moment, then proceed to butcher it the next. The Combat system still stinks, the Skill selection system seems rather hit or miss, the inventory system is almost an afterthought, and the random deaths still crop up to infuriate you. What saves it though is the improved story, as trying to figure out how to kidnap a heavily guarded Princess is some fun "Mission Impossible" type stuff, and providing 3 different possible options for doing so was a fantastic addition. It's too bad we will never get to know how the story turned out, as obviously more books were planned here. The real "bugger" in me thinks it would have been great to have some kind of official notification from the authors that, following the kidnapping of the Princess, the Resistance was brutally crushed, Edrix was executed, and Luko still rules to this day, which is why there were no further books. Speaking of Luko, I do feel somewhat cheated that we never got any kind of confrontation with him, or any encounter at all for that matter. Overall though my experience with this two-book series, which felt very much like "Lone Wolf DLC" to use a video gaming term, was a net positive, and the books sure are nice to look at. Production value does count for at least something I think, as it makes you feel like you are playing something a little more special than usual. Unfortunately though, the series did not quite live up to the promise of that initial impression.