Webs of Intrigue

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1. The Money Spider - Score = 7.3   Tier = Good

Attempts to Beat: 11

The start of a new series, this time from authors Robin Waterfield and Wilfred Davies, and I have to admit being a bit nervous about this one. I believe this is the first book I have played with no "chance" element involved, such as dice rolling, flipping coins, or blindly pointing to numbers on a chart. I had my doubts as to whether this format could actually work and still provide an interesting and exciting adventure, and as such felt there was a lot riding on this one for me personally. This is because I know there are several gamebooks that have come out in recent years (that I hope to get to eventually), along with series such as "Virtual Reality" from the 90's, that also eschew the more randomizing mechanics of standard gamebooks, and I hope I can still enjoy them as much as I have many of the ones I have played up to now. I'm happy to report, at least for myself and just based on this one gamebook, that I now believe it is quite possible to still deliver a challenging adventure without the need of ever having to "roll the bones", or something to the equivalent. This adventure in particular helped to allay one of the main fears I had, which I will get to later, if even I think there was some room for improvement here in a few other areas.

Beginning with the story and what this adventure is all about, we find ourselves playing as an already well established and internationally known (to various government agencies, if not the general public) private investigator, who makes his living earning top dollar by solving strange and unusual cases. We go by the code name of T.S., which stands for "Troubleshooter", and yes that is incredibly lame. The prologue basically tells you that you are for the most part playing a modern day (modern when this book was published at least) Sherlock Holmes, and even quotes the famous fictional detective himself. Like Holmes, you live in London and routinely aid the police, but unlike Holmes you have no "Dr Watson" aiding you. And while Holmes solved cases for the intellectual thrill, our character seems to be motivated by monetary gain, and has in fact been able to earn a large amount of money by helping not just the London police, but also governments around Europe in solving their unusual problems, for a fee of course. You are talked up quite a bit in the prologue, and it's clear you are supposed to be some sort of genius. The plot of this particular adventure opens with you receiving a phone call from your contact at Scotland Yard, who asks you to go down to the Bank of England right away. When you arrive, you discover that there has been a bomb threat at the Bank, although thankfully no one was hurt and no damage was done, as the bomb never went off. Without much to go on except for the bomb itself and the testimony of the police constable who discovered it, you nevertheless need to solve the mystery of who planted the bomb and for what purpose. 

I already knew going in there was no dice rolling involved, but was surprised to see there were no statistics or attributes in use either. The only thing you need to keep track of here is the clues that you find and their corresponding number. There is a chart at the front of the book (cunningly drawn in the shape of a web) which has 72 spaces marked off, and you are meant to check off the appropriate numbered space for each clue that you find. I have my doubts there are actually 72 different clues in the adventure, as I felt I explored pretty thoroughly and didn't come anywhere close to uncovering this many in total, and I wonder if this number 72 was used to make the book seem even more intricate than it is (or maybe for some other reason?). I wasn't about to go through every section and count them all though so this is more of a suspicion than anything. 

The first half of the book begins with your preliminary investigation, and you are immediately sent to a hub section which gives you 7 different options you can choose to explore in an attempt to gather evidence regarding who was responsible for the bomb and what their motive is. These options include such possibilities as: seeking out the teenager who reported the presence of the bomb; investigating the origin of the explosives used in the bomb; or determining where the timer used in the bomb was manufactured and to who it was sold, just to name a few. Each of the options you are given to explore can vary wildly in intricacy and length, with some only requiring a couple of phone calls that take up only a few sections of the book, to others that lead you on a wild and involved chase taking you across half of Europe. As you explore each of the possible threads, each time that you uncover a piece of information you are also provided with a clue number that corresponds to that info, and you thus keep track of what you have learned in this manner. Some of these clues are absolutely essential to learn should you wish to proceed through the adventure, and even more of them are red herrings that only serve to dial up your "clue count". Ah yes, you see you can't just explore everywhere and try everything, because at the end of each thread you are sent back to the hub section, but not before being asked how many total clues you have discovered so far. You need to uncover at least 3 of the essential clues should you wish to proceed to the second half of the adventure, but should your total clues uncovered be between 7 and 12 and you don't have at least 3 essential clues (and you are provided a list of which numbered clues are deemed essential at this point), then you are taken off the case because you were taking too long, and you lose the game. You also lose the game should your total clue count rise above 12, regardless of if you have 3 of the needed clues or not. 

Once you have discovered the minimum 3 essential clues without taking too long to do so, you are then allowed to proceed to the second half of the adventure. Your initial investigation leads you to strongly suspect several individuals who come from a certain village on Continental Europe. However, the evidence you have uncovered so far is circumstantial, so in order to get the criminal convictions that you are aiming for, you will need to travel to this village and attempt to acquire some hard evidence. And while the first half of the adventure played out for the most part as a very open ended "police procedural", the second half turns into a more standard gamebook-style quest with a strong "action movie" feel. You can find yourself involved in shootouts with kidnappers, exploring underground tunnels, climbing mountains, and even be drugged and stranded on an island in the middle of a lake (in true James Bond villain "we won't kill him when we have the chance" fashion). The best sequence of the whole adventure for me occurs in this back half of the book, involving you exploring the remote village where all the people there seem to be guarding some dark secret. This really gives this part of the adventure a great "Wicker Man" feel to it, with people acting strangely everywhere you go, clearly hiding something that they will go to great lengths to keep you from exposing. 

The whole clue mechanic is not forgotten in this back half either, as you will still need to keep discovering essential clues in this half of the adventure in order to be able to prove your suspicions. The difficulty level dials up here too, containing several sequences where any wrong move means either missing out on an essential clue, or just ending the adventure outright. Once you manage to navigate your way through to the end, gathering as many of those all-important clues along the way as you can find because you won't know which ones will be deemed essential, you return to London and this is where the rubber really meets the road. I hope you managed to collect a boatload of those clues, because you are going to need them in order to run the gauntlet required to win. Unlike in the test that concluded the first half of the book, which saw you only requiring to have discovered 3 of a possible 7 essential clues, the ending here is far more strict. First, as expected, you are asked if you have 4 specific clue numbers. However, this time you need ALL of these 4 clues or the game is over. Once you have all these you should be good though right? Nope! There is another check after this, only requiring you to have 2 specific clues this time, but again you need both of these or you lose. Ok, so certainly once you have passed this check, now you have won? Nope! There is yet ANOTHER check that follows this one, and this time you need to have discovered a whopping 7 specific clues, and yes once again you need all 7 or you have failed. Phew! Having three separate clue checks in a row like this is quite clever (and devious), as you can't learn which numbered clues you may be missing until you make it to the next check. Not only that, but some of the required clues are only to be found way back near the very beginning of the book, so you may have technically lost the adventure long ago without realizing it. Cheeky bastards these authors! Once you finally assemble all the needed clues (a total of 13 specific ones to pass the end game), you then have enough evidence to bring charges, and the suspects are extradited to England to stand trial for their crimes, and you win.      

While on the one hand I felt the use of the numbered clues to prove how much evidence you had accumulated was clever and interesting, the drawback was that I found that I wasn't so much searching for actual information as much as I was just looking for the specific numbers I eventually learned that I needed to find. For example I knew that I needed to find clue #42 because it was essential to winning, but what knowledge did that clue actually represent? I probably forget that shortly after leaving the section it was discovered on. This might be my fault for not taking more detailed notes on the clues themselves, but I'm not sure how necessary that was, because you quickly notice certain names popping up more than once during your initial investigation, and it doesn't take the genius that my character is supposed to be to realize that this can't be a coincidence, and that you should follow up on anything involving those names. Overall though I was quite impressed by the design of the whole adventure and how the authors really did a great job in spreading out all the information that you needed to find. You will likely need to explore this book very thoroughly in order to win, and that is always a big positive for me.  

What I thought slightly let down the adventure though was the mystery itself, which I didn't personally find all that compelling, and I found myself disappointed when I finally uncovered the motives behind the bombers. I mention on my homepage that there would be spoilers involved in these reviews, but for a mystery style gamebook such as this I would still feel bad if I gave away too much. Because it is learned very early in the adventure, I don't think it's giving anything away though to note that the bomb planted at The Bank of England was never intended by the culprits to go off. And while I am not suggesting that bomb scares are to be taken lightly, the fact is that no one was hurt and no damage was done, so it doesn't really feel like an investigator of your supposed renown would have been called in on this in the first place. And once you learn the motivations behind the perpetrators, it is tough not to be somewhat sympathetic to their plight.  The main "bad guy" you are pursuing, the mysterious man known as the "Spider" from the title, while obviously capable of criminal acts, is also described as being a lifelong philanthropist who even helped people escape from the Third Reich way back in World War 2. And while this blurring of the lines between right and wrong was very likely intentional by the authors, it didn't give me the satisfaction of breaking up a dangerous criminal group, and actually left me feeling more like I was the Sherriff of Nottingham to the criminals' Robin Hood. Something that has been nagging at me though since I finished the book, is that if the bomb was never intended to go off in the first place, why did the culprits need to use actual explosives? Anything that even remotely looked like a bomb would have had the same effect as what they got. As it was, they used a real bomb and went to great lengths to make sure it was discovered before it went off so that no one would be hurt, so I don't know why they would have even chanced to take that risk.   

I mentioned at the top of the review my biggest fear with this style of book that has no chance element, and that would be if your choices, particularly during the end-game, would have any meaning. For example, once I had worked out how and where to gather all the information that would allow me to proceed right to the end of the adventure, any key choices I would have to make from that point on would seem to have very little riding on them, as I would be guaranteed 100% to be able to make it right back here again should I choose a poor course of action. Suppose I have a key decision to make right at the very end between 3 different options. Regardless of whether I had gathered the information along the way to help me make the correct decision, even if I got the decision wrong and failed, I would be assured to get right back here again just by following the path I had worked out, and to then just pick a different option. For that matter, why even bother starting over? Just going back to the section where the decision was made and picking again would result in essentially the same thing. Thankfully, this adventure doesn't have this problem (for the most part), because the rapid fire 3 separate tests at the end asking you if you have ALL the many essential clues makes it unlikely you would gather all of these clues on your first or even second time there anyway, although this is still technically possible. I had worried that the great tension created by some end-games I have played, such as say, the end-game of Deathtrap Dungeon, where placing the gems in the incorrect order could result in death, would be lost. There was a heck of a lot riding on that gem placement sequence because of how hard it was to get that far. Now imagine if you were absolutely guaranteed to get back to that sequence even if you died, because you now knew the safe path through and there was zero chance of death. What would be the point of even playing the gem sequence? So while I was happy that the authors were able to devise a conclusion to this adventure that avoided this pitfall, I will be interested to see if all gamebooks that do not have any chance elements can account for these late-game decisions as well.    

Ranking: The first gamebook of this style that I have played, but I was impressed by the design here and how the authors scattered all the needed clues in such a way that had me exploring the book so completely. The story was another matter, and the reason the book didn't score even better is because I just didn't find this case all that interesting, despite there being the odd exciting set-piece in the back half of the adventure. I am looking forward to the next, and final, book in the series, and judging by the title of that one I assume our old friend the "Spider" will be our adversary again, so perhaps we can put him away for good this time!

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2. The Water Spider - Score = 6.3   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 14

So how does the follow-up fare? Overall, not so favorably actually. Continuing on playing as the same character from the previous book, I will say though that the case we are presented with here is more interesting than the one from that first series entry, and is more fitting of something a modern day Sherlock Holmes would have been called in on to investigate. The story opens with us being contacted by a former client of ours, Stephen Prescott-Jones, who is the chairman of a large smelting company. It seems that Prescott-Jones was having a shipment of gold delivered from Cape Town, South Africa to Southampton, England for use in his business. The gold was sent by ship, aboard the MV Helscot, and was locked up within a high-tech uncrackable safe kept within the ship's hold, that only a couple of people knew the combination for. However, upon arriving in Southampton, the safe was opened only to find that it was empty. There were no obvious signs of tampering to the safe, or that it had ever been opened along the voyage, so Prescott-Jones hires you to find out just one thing...."Where's my gold?" (Sounding a bit like the Leprechaun from the cheesy horror movies). 

The adventure yo-yo's quite a bit in terms of quality all throughout. After that really interesting opening and presentation of the case at hand, the adventure begins by having us interview ALL the members of the ship. Thankfully, they are broken up into groups of Officers, Specialists, and Deckhands, and we can choose the order we wish to speak to them. Not so thankfully though, unlike the opening to the previous book which set us loose right away to investigate or ignore what we liked, this book forces you to interview all the ship members before you can move on to the next phase of the investigation, leaving only the order in which you talk to these sailors up to your discretion. The book itself even tells you this next part is going to be tedious (and it wasn't lying!) and it quickly starts to drag. You do learn a very essential clue during this sequence, but because it is impossible to miss, it doesn't contribute to making you feel like you yourself have done anything special.  

So once we have slogged through that part of the book, the quality of the adventure yo-yo's back upwards again, and we begin what is easily the best part of the whole experience. Once the interviews of the members of the ship are concluded, we are set loose to explore or ignore any of 7 different threads in any order we choose. These opening options include the investigation of: the safe itself; the various ports of call the ship made along its voyage; the current state of the gold market; the personal lives of the crew; a handful of crew members who departed the ship earlier in the voyage; various companies associated with the gold transaction; or the strange case of a castaway who was picked up by the ship off the coast of Spain. As before, each avenue of inquiry will have us uncovering various numbered clues, some essential, most not, and there are 4 essential specific numbered clues we must find before we are allowed to proceed to the back half of the adventure. There seemed to me to be far more numbered clues to find in this book than in the previous one, even though I still don't believe there are close to 72, which is still the same number of possible clues as listed in the chart at the front of the book. At least part of this probably has to do with this book containing more sections than did the first book (300 sections here as opposed to 280 sections for the previous adventure), and it now occurs to me that the authors probably chose this number to give them the option of using more clues in future books without having to change their chart. (Although you would think expanding the number of clues on the chart wouldn't be such a big deal). 

This whole opening investigation is even more intricate than the first adventure, and not just because there are more clues to uncover. Here, there are certain essential clues that have a time limit should you wish to obtain them, so gathering the essential clues themselves isn't enough, as you now have to plot out the order in which you need to pick them up as well. And once again there is a nice mixture of some of the options taking you only a few sections to explore, such as investigating the state of the gold market, and others that lead you down a rabbit hole of chasing people all across Europe and even Africa, if even to only get their statements and possibly rule them out as suspects. Once you gather the 4 needed clue numbers and can pass the check required to end your preliminary investigation, you are asked if you then want to head out to the suspect's location, or continue to gather more evidence. Should you choose to head out, you are then immediately given another clue check, and must have 5 more essential numbered clues in order to proceed. Again, this is another nicely constructed way that the authors prevent you from learning exactly which clue numbers you need beforehand, but because it is more onerous in the sense that you have to have ALL the listed clues this time to proceed as opposed to only 3 of 7 as seen in the first book, it means you do not get the opportunity to explore the back half of the adventure (even if you can't technically "win" just yet anyway) until you have absolutely explored the hell out of the first half. Although seeing as how the back half of the adventure plays out, I can see why perhaps the authors wouldn't want you to see it. Because.....

Oh brother. That's the sound of the yo-yo hitting the floor, because does the quality of the adventure ever fall off a cliff once we get to this back half. Although it's more like the back third, because this time there isn't nearly as much going on once you finally assemble enough evidence to head out to where you believe the suspects are holed up. It starts off well enough, as you and an ally of yours head out covertly to investigate an island where you will clearly not be welcomed by the locals. Once you arrive on shore, you both need to sneak across the island towards a station in the north. What should have made for some nice stealth gameplay however just descends into a string of random "pick option a or option b", and if you pick wrong then you are caught by the islanders and the adventure is over. And this is precisely where my fears going into the first book became realized, because as I now knew exactly how to get back to the section where I made the incorrect choice, is there even any point to starting over and doing all the exact same things knowing I am 100% guaranteed to arrive back here again? 

So once you finally trial-and-error your way to the station and reveal to the authorities what you believe has happened to the gold, here then begins another final stretch of 3 separate clue checks to determine if you found all the necessary information to be able to prove your theories and win the adventure. And boy do these ever take the awful tasting cake. The first check asks if you have a mere 2 different clue numbers, the problem being that these 2 specific clues were a part of the group of 5 required clues that allowed you to come here in the first place! You thus couldn't have made it this far without these 2 clues, so this check is completely pointless (or "clueless" if you will). The second check requires a mere 1 essential clue number, and it was a clue that was picked up only a couple of sections immediately preceding the check. True, there is another random 50/50 choice that needed to be made to get this clue, but again you are guaranteed to get back here at this point anyway, so why bother? The final check, as with the first book, is a whopper, requiring you to have located all of a list of 10 essential clue numbers. But this check is almost as pointless as the first one, because 7 of the clue numbers were included in the first half checks that allowed you to come here in the first place as well, including the exact same 2 from the first check being asked about again! That's terrible. And even of the remaining 3 clues, I'm not sure if it was possible to make it this far having missed them. 

The manner in which the story itself is resolved is nothing short of eye-rolling, and it involves your character being improbably lucky to such a degree that it beggars belief. There is almost no atmosphere created here either, which is incredibly disappointing considering the setting, and strings of "turn to" references begin to appear here as well, and this whole ending sequence just smacked of the authors wanting to end this book as soon as possible and get on with a different project. There is even one point during the adventure we are told that our codename, T.S., stands for "Tenacious Sleuth". Hang on, I thought it stood for "Troubleshooter"? Was this a goof by the authors because they had already "checked out"? Gotta hand it to them though, they managed to come up with a name even lamer than the original. 

After finishing this adventure, I had the same feeling that I had upon completing the first book, in that our character is an asshole. Even though he ultimately escapes us again, we learn that our adversary from the first book, the "Spider", is the real mastermind here, but also once again the reasons for his actions are incredibly sympathetic, if not noble. While legally speaking we are in the right, I found it tough not to feel guilty over the role I played in the outcome that will likely destroy a whole community's way of life. This is even more true due to how personally wealthy our character is supposed to be, and not only that, but we are apparently greedy as well, as due to the ridiculous swerve at the end of the adventure, one of our motivating factors in solving the case is to become even more filthy rich, as we realize we may be able to keep a large amount of gold for ourselves. There are smaller moments as well, such as a scene where we heckle a dirt-poor old man who is just trying to cross a narrow bridge with his mule because he is taking too long, and we can't get by in our car until he does. What a jerk!

     

Anyone remember this Denis Leary song? That's us.

Ranking: This score is heavily influenced by the first two-thirds or so of the adventure, which retained the same intriguing design as shown in the first book, if perhaps making it more strict, while at the same time using a more interesting case as the backdrop. It was well on its way to scoring higher than that first book, but ouch does the last act ever knock the score down several pegs. This final act is filled with random choices leading to game over, pointless clue checks, and an eye-rolling conclusion to the story. Oh and to top it all off, our character comes off as some sort of greedy prick. The authors themselves already seemed tired of the concept only two books in, and I'm not surprised there were no more entries after the way book 2 ended.     

Thoughts on this two-book series as a whole: While I appreciated, at least initially, the style and approach here, this is definitely not the kind of gamebook I would want to play regularly. It was a nice change of pace for sure, and I'm glad I played them, but there is a lot of reading through files and interviewing witnesses etc., that it can become more tedious the more of it you play. (And check out those thrilling book covers eh?) If there had been any more entries to the series, I think I would have stopped here and come back to the others later, because I definitely need to be in the right mood for these. I do feel relieved though to learn that dice-less gamebooks can be done well if they are addressed with proper thought and care.