Gamebooks

[Barrington Boots]

Star Strider

This was a totally new book to me. It was... not great. No playthrough writeup because (a) I'm pressed for time and (b) if there's one thing this book likes it's an arbitrary death. Several times I was asked to roll a dice or two, and certain results just killed me outright. The book also likes a surprise death eg left door or right door? One of them just kills you instantly, no clues or anything. I stopped counting these deaths after a while, because that's just terrible design, and flipped back whenever I encountered one.

The book charges you with finding the kidnapped president and takes you across 'an unimportant planet called Earth' - Madrid, Rome, Paris and London. This sounds like it could be cool, but there's no discernable difference between Rome and Paris and you're barely there anyway, and the London bit is basically just wandering the London Underground tunnels in a load of turn left or turn right choices (in fairness, there is a map). In Madrid you do fight a robot bull for an unexplained reason.
Combats are not tricky if you've at least got a Skill of 9. There's a number of math puzzles, but nothing too tricky for an adult. One thing that is interesting is that you only have 48 'time units' to finish the book and it periodically tells you to deduct time. This only really starts to pressure you at the end when you're wandering in the maze of tunnels.

The cover has nothing to do with the book, although it might be an encounter I missed (as per Demons of the Deep). The internal art is smart, if a bit unremarkable. The writing is alright - it's better than Space Assassin - but its still quite terse and doesn't bother telling you anything the author isn't interested in writing about - this is an excerpt from an actual paragraph from the book (for context I've just run into a gang of rogue androids and have been told I need to run away and can run left or right (I went left))

"You run fast, keeping close to the buildings and occasionally waving to avoid stun shots. Suddenly an arm grabs you, and you are halted in your tracks by another group. When they rob you, they come across your ID. This stops them and they take you back to the others. When you find out they detest the Groms, their creators, you explain your mission."

That's lazy writing in the extreme. No real attempt to go into any detail, and the rest of the paragraph just gives me a choice to go on somewhere without making reference to the sidequest I was on when I met these guys.

Overall, it lacks atmosphere. It does have a couple of jokes in it, like some cat Aliens being from Whiskas-4, and a slightly lighthearted tone, but it doesn't lean into being daft enough for this to be anything other than a distraction. I'm 27 books deep into the series and must be pushing 40 gamebooks played since I started now and I guess I've less tolerance for a bad book - it's not as bad as, say, Starship Traveller but I'd hesitate to recommend this one. Normally when I finish these I like to flick back through and see where different choices would have led me, but this time I couldn't be bothered. Next!

[Richard]

Oh dear! And there are three more books by this author to come!

[Richard]

Jimbo, how are you getting on with The Crown of Kings?

[Barrington Boots]

Just seen the original picture of Shareella the Snow Witch on a copy of Warlock Magazine and she is super-80s:



Still got the bird hat, but a leggings and 80s ankle boots. She looks like she could be fighting the Ghostbusters.
I think I prefer this to the 80s version or Les Edwards more sultry image on the reissue.

[Richard]

Good find! I wouldn't mess with her!

[Barrington Boots]

Phantoms of Fear

This is another brand-new book for me, and my copy also feels very new despite being printed in 1987.

The plot here is that I'm a wood elf shaman who has had a Watership Down style vision of some terrible evil corrupting the forest and eventually all the land. I need to head off and defeat the demon prince Ishtra (who is immune to all earthly weapons). It's an interesting start and very different from the usual 'you're a wandering adventurer' stuff and the old 'only you can save the world, off you go with no provisions or friends' cliche is set due to this being some kind of dream-inspired message from the Elven gods. You being an elf is also a nice touch and this is referenced a number of times throughout.
As a shaman I have a new stat: POWER, which is a sort of measure of my dream potency and isn't capped at your starting rate like the usual FF stats. I started with a high power, which I soon found out is essential for this book (as ever, high skill is pretty important). As ever, when given the choice I always take the left-hand path (or go west)

After an inspiring dream I set off West into the forest, pausing to share a campfire with some humans moving east away from the oncoming corruption of Ishtra. As I continue west it becomes evident to me that things are not right in the forest, forcing me into combats with some forest creatures (including a skill 6 boar that beat me up quite badly). That night, asleep in a tree, I have another strange and disturbing dream but am able to navigate the visions of horror and draw further power from mastering the dream world around me. The next day, continuing west, I stumble across a sort of elephant's graveyard for the huge and majestic deer that roam the forest. I approach with humility and the spirits of the place wish we well on my quest and grant me a boon of a twelve-branched antler.
By the afternoon I am climbing a hill within the forest and decide to sleep overnight in a cave, experiencing another cryptic dream (I was initially frantically noting down all the stuff in these dreams, convinded they'd be clues and stuff - not sure they are there's too much to describe really, but they're all allegorical and weird). When morning comes the light shows me a narrow passage at the back of the cave. My magic detects no harm within, so I crawl inside and eventually come into a large cavern, illuminated by phosphorescent lichen and containing the skeleton of an adventurer with their hand trapped underneath a large rock. The rock wasn't heavy enough to trap the poor soul here, so I suspect something's up with whatever is under the rock and decline to move it, instead examining the skeleton and taking from it a silvery green pendant.
Eventually I make it out of the cavern and cresting a nearby rise am shocked to see the corrupted forest ahead of me: kilometers of rotting trees and decaying vegetation surrounded in a foul miasma. A foul wind buffets me in a way that seems almost directed, and I am forced to continue my journey at a crawl for a while before descending into the terrible valley below.
The final bastion of good before I enter the valley is some kind of pixie glade, where I am able to refresh myself and am given a second boon: a magical silvery branch, one of twenty-two. Then it's into the corrupted part of the forest, and it is grim indeed. I am informed that my magic no longer works - I'd used it exactly once so far in a useless way, so that's not really a great loss - due to the great aura of evil that permeates this place. After fighting off an attack from some manky roots from the evil trees that were no match for my elven blade I follow a worn path to a wall of poisonous brambles which, when climbed through, reveal a ramshackle hut, neatly walled off from the rest of the forest. I'm watching this shack with care when a foot comes down on the back of my neck and a gruff voice demands I give up my weapon. Ulp!

I'm a peaceable Elven type so I throw my blade aside and stand to face my captor: a wild, savage looking human with a well care for, shiny axe. It soon becomes apparent that this guy is totally crazed and has a very tenuous grip on reality as he keeps laughing and muttering to himself, but I bide my time and address him carefully and respectfully until he calms down a bit. Due to my impressive POWER score my voice and bearing eventually break through his lunacy and a semblance of sanity returns to his eyes. He offers me a small piece of amber with a number 20 inscribed upon it, and allows me to stay in his hut overnight, which seems to be a sensible option as opposed to sleeping out in the forest of evil so I accept. That night I have an awful dream where a tree attempts to throttle me, and I first deal with the rubbish dream combat (more on this later) but I am dream-victorious, increasing my power further, and the next morning my crazed host, now somewhat less crazed, offers to join me on my quest. His name is Eric Rune-Axe and he is a retired adventurer who part-lost his mind in the maze of Zagor (I empathise - we've all been there dude). With the encroaching evil of Ishtra he seems doomed if he stays alone, and I could do with a new Mungo / mate, so off we go together!
Somehow navigating the poisonous holly again we press on together, him chuckling away to himself at odd moments. In the middle of all the corruption I am surprised to spot a beautiful deer - Eric seems cautious but I approach, thinking perhaps it is an avatar or vision from the Elven gods. It isn't, it's a shapechanger, and this absolutely mauls me. Its only SKILL 10 but that outclasses me and leave me on 6 STAMINA. There's no reward for killing it so I scarf down as many nuts and berries from my pack as I can and we head on, only to be ambushed by a gang of dark elves. There's six of them and we must fight three each. Again this combat is appallingly hard for me - I dispatch my foes, leaving me on a grand total stamina of 2, only to find Eric is dead and I must face two remaining dark elves, who cut me down for an ignoble end to my quest.
Disappointed I rewind a bit, avoid the shapechanger fight so I can tackle the elves with full stamina, and die again. Looks like I'm not skilful enough to beat this one, time for a full restart...!

So using the power of Elven magic I reroll my intrepid shaman to have a higher skill and start again. Following the same path, the only real change is that fight more bears, less moose, and I lose dream combat to the nightmare tree so have less power and less in the way of provisions. Me and Eric skip the shapechanger, take on the dark elves and this time I use luck like a madman in the combat and am able to survive the ambush with a ten stamina, but Eric does not survive. I eat the rest of my lembas and sadly bury poor old Eric, who was a total Mungo indeed. It seems I must walk this path alone. With my heart full of foreboding, I approach the entrance to Ishtra's tunnels - two huge pillars of ivory flanking a tunnel winding down into darkness. Glad in the uniform of a dark elf I proceed nervously into the darkness.

As I wind donwards into the earth I begin to realise that, so close to Ishtra's power, the worlds of reality and unreality are beginning to overlap and I can at this point switch between the waking and dreamworld almost at will. When in the dreamworld I will still sleepwalk about, which seems like a terrible idea, so I decide to stick with the real world for the time being. At a fork in the tunnel a statue of a sphinx warns me that the left hand path means death - but I suspect it is lying so I take that path and lo and behold a portcullis slams down and cuts me in half. Oops!
Turns out the sphinx was lying because it meant it's own left not mine... a cruel trick. I'm not fighting those dark elves again so I restart from the sphinx, go right, and conceal myself behind a pile of bones to avoid a virtual army of orcs on the march. I'm given the option of entering the dreamworld here but nodding off behind a mound of skulls with orcs about doesn't seem wise so I press on, stubbornly sticking west and passing a checkpoint by showing a boars tusk (this apparently is what all recruits are given as passes, so the boar population round here must be decimated!)
At this point I sort of wander about it, blagging my way past various goons, until I find a series of doors marked 11,22,33,44,55 and 66. I have the option of rolling my dice and when I roll a double opening that door, a process I can continue to do, or I can wander off. I've no idea why there's no element of choice here - perhaps my Elven traditions mean opening numbered doors can only be left to fate? A ridiculous amount of dice rolling leads me to first open a pantry, then find a door is locked, and finally open a third door that brings a patrol of bad guys rushing onto me who I cannot blag past and they murder me where I stand. WEAK auto death.

I restart at the sphinx, same route, but this time I decide to try entering the dreamworld when hiding in the bone pile. As you'd expect this shifts things to the deeply surreal, as instead of tunnels and underground rivers I find myself navigating deserts, volcanos and twisted woodlands. It's all very weird and difficult to map, and after I while I get a premonition of danger so I drop out of the dreamlands and find myself in a totally different place in the dungeon, having wandered whilst asleep into a room full of some weird mutant things called prowlers. Dispatching these with my new awesome skill isn't too hard and for good measure I smash up their eggs to stop any more of the horrid things emerging. I head north but find myself back where I was last time, so I go back into the dreamworld, swim a dream-ocean, move through a bleeding forest and eventually end up having to fight a sort of dream snake-demon with legs which I can only beat by rolling 8-12 on two dice three times in succession. WTAF. In a bizarre twist, I immediately did this and with my power stat intact am able to wrest control of the dream away from this creature and escape.
As the dreamworld gets increasingly hellish I'm told I'd best get back in the real world as I'm nearing the source of corruption. I do and find myself.... back at those dice rolling doors! I'm not doing that again.
I go left, sensing 'great evil' ahead and it's an auto-death paragraph. But wait! I can enter the dreamworld here! I do so and find myself facing Morpheus, the lieutenant of Ishtra: a vast bloated maggot-like creature composed solely of the seething, roiling stuff of nightmares of all creatures. Before I can face him I have to face three dream combats, against the nightmarish visions of a harpy, clawbeast and a wraith. Unable to win, I am forced out of the dreamworld back to the auto-death paragraph where a suffocating blanket of evil envelops me and drains my lifeforce away, leaving me a husk on the tunnel floor.

At this point I sort of gave up. I'd like to revisit this one, but it cannot be emphasised how utterly not fun the dream combat is in this book. You literally just roll 2d6: on a 2 - 7 you lose 2 power and 8 - 12 the enemy does. Your power does get restored after each fight but it's boring - literally just rolling dice over and over - and it's weighted against you so it's just not fun at all. Then there was that awful bit with the doors where I just sat there trying to roll doubles until I got a roll that killed me (I assume there's a cool prize behind one of the doors, but who wants to do that and find out?) and then the fight with the snake monster which I managed to pass, but the odds were so against me doing so I'd never want to do that again.

I did actually peek ahead at the last combat and it's either another super-power fight or you need a dizzying array of items so it's not like I would have got any further (and I would have auto-died beforehand anyway due to an item I was carrying)

There's a lot of cool stuff in this book. The writing is really nicely done, with the forest bits being very descriptive and vivid (for a gamebook) and the dream sequences being confusing and strange, in a good way - I felt very invested and drawn into the world. Being able to switch between the waking world and the dream world is a great idea and it leads the final part being, from what I can tell, two separate dungeons overlaid over each other so you can navigate between them, and the final combat can be done either in the physical or the dream realm. It's very innovative stuff.
Less good is the magic: at the start you're given a list of spells, of which I got the chance to use exactly one, and then when you get to the second part of the book none of your spells work so that whole bit gets ditched. Felt like a real waste of time even having them in there.

The art is all by Ian Miller, which suits the weird dream sequences and the corrupted forests fantastically, but the cover has to be the worst one I've ever seen for a FF book, being best described as some snot demons. As a kid I didn't like Ian Miller's work at all and would actively have avoided this based on the cover: as an adult I appreciate him a lot more, but I still think this cover is dreadful.

All in all it's a book I really wanted to love but ended up putting aside out of frustration. Creature of Havoc and Nightmare Castle were two of the best in the series and then they've been followed by this, Star Strider and Crypt of the Sorcerer and I know Chasms of Malice is to come.... not a strong run for the late 20s.

[Richard]

That's a very detailed review!

I'm not very surprised that you didn't like it much, because I know I've played that book and yet I have no recollection of it at all, except for the sleepwalking idea, which I had forgotten until you described it. And that cover is indeed truly terrible.

I think I'll have a flick through the pages to see the interior art, but I'm not going to read it, based on your review. I appreciate your noble sacrifice!

[Trooper McFad]

Wow Boots that's almost a book in itself 😂😂

I do like your in-depth reviews even though I'm not a game book gamer I might be tempted one day when I've stopped filling my spare time modelling

[Barrington Boots]

Perhaps I did go a bit overboard on the length on this one.. glad you guys both enjoyed it!

I think with a bit of revision, this would be a very good FF book. It's unique and interesting but poorly put together in places.

[Barrington Boots]

Midnight Rogue

I've had a week off work and spent some of it playing this. It's almost all new books for me now in the series and this was a completely new read. The concept is that I am a low-ranking member of the thieves guild in Port Blacksand and to graduate I have to undertake a test - to find and steal the priceless Eye of the Basilisk gem from a merchant named Brass before dawn comes (I thought the time limit would be significant, but it isn't at all and is never referred to again, apart from the fact that whole quest takes place at night)
I start with some basic thief gear and a choice of 'special skills' - climb, hide, sneak, pick lock, pick pocket and spot hidden. It sounds like I'll be on a burglary job, so I go with spot hidden, sneak and pick lock.

Starting off I'm given the choice of going straight to Brass's house, the merchant guild or a scummy area of town called The Noose. I decide to go with the latter to try and scope out some info on my target. I chat to a beggar, who gives me some basic info and a rope and grapple (not sure why he had that on him - but this gives me the climb skill) before sloping off to the pub where I win some coin but lack the secret signs skill so don't get much more info. A visit to Madame Star (from City of Thieves) proves more useful as she says I must visit both a place of sleep, a place of work, and then a place of death.
Figuring this means Brass's house and office, I head to the merchant's quarter, run afoul of a ghoul that was lurking around, then proceed to case the joint. The guard is barely awake, and I am sneaky, so I cosh him over the head and then am about to try the door when I notice a secret sign on it. Even though I don't have secret signs skill the book tells me not to open the door, so I go around the building. An unlocked door looks tempting, but I can hear someone within, so instead I use my rope and grapple to get onto the roof. Unfortunately the roof edge is covered in sharp shards of glass, which cuts my rope to bits and also my hands when I desperately pull myself over the edge for skill and stamina penalties.
Wrapping my bloodied hands in rags I discover the glass wasn't the only deterrent on the roof: a gargoyle animates and attacks me. I skip through the skylight, dodge some traps with my spot hidden skills, pick the lock to brasses office and rifle his desk, finding a significant key and some deeds of purchase showing Brass has bought some land at 'Barrow Hill'. A place of death was it? Aha!
Job done here I head off to Brass's house, dodge the city watch, pick the lock and head upstairs. Brass's home office has a safe in it with two locks, of which I have one key - I try picking the other but the lock contains a tiny poisonous snake that whips out and bites me, so I give that up as a bad job and instead try to find Brass's bedroom. With my sneaky skills its easy to creep around without alerting the household, and soon I'm standing over the sleeping Brass himself looking at the second key, which is around his neck. I try to lift it, but without the deft fingers pick pocket skill would provide I wake him and have to flee the house in a hurry. My only choice now is to go to the gem's location. I'm sure it's at Barrow Hill (rather than, say, Lors Azzurs Palace) but when I get there, I'm lacking the info I needed from the safe and have to give up my quest. FAIL.

Second attempt! This time I choose pick lock, pick pocket and sneak, skipping spot hidden.

This time I broadly retrace my previous run , minus a few missteps like the ghoul. Ignoring the guard at the merchant's guild, this time I eschew the roof and try the unlocked door where the person within turns out to be... another beggar who this time gives me some lock picks, duplicating the pick lock skill. Score!
He lets me into the guild, but this time I don't have spot hidden and set off the 'alarm' - a Jib-Jib (as seen in Sorcery) hidden in an alcove in the wall. I have to step on the poor little chap to stop it yelling and alerting everyone.
From there it's back up the Brass's office, steal his key and stuff, back to the house, have a little poke around to ensure I'm on the right track, and then successfully take the key from the sleeping merchant's neck. This enables me to unlock the safe (not sure where the snake goes) and pillage the contents which includes confirmation that the Eye is indeed at Barrow Hill.
I've now got all three numeric clues I needed (from Star, the office desk and house safe) so off I go to Barrow Hill where I find both a barrow and the burnt out, ruined remains of a house. I solve a reasonably easy puzzle on a rotating statue that opens up a hidden doorway in the barrow itself, so lighting my torch I tiptoe down the stairs to find what's within - what's within turns out to be a pit trap, which now lacking spot hidden I plunge into and only escape because I have the rope and grapple from the beggar.
Battered and bruised, I continue on, encountering bats, a fake door, a secret door and some skeletons from the barrow itself. After dispatching the latter, I must fight a skeleton lord with a thief-mauling magic sword. Victorious I loot various junk but I can't figure out the secret sign in the barrow and cannot proceed further. FAIL AGAIN.

OK, that sucks. Third try. This time I go with pick pockets, sneak and spot hidden.

Basically, it's a full replay of the above, without the jib-jib murder and the pitfall. This time I get battered quite badly by the skeleton lord but despite not knowing the secret sign, spot hidden allows me to figure out that the dais in the barrow can be rolled back leading to a hidden underground level. There are steps down here with an ogre asleep at the bottom, which is weird, but I sneak past him and into an underground dungeon complex. This doesn't seem very merchant-y...
I navigate a few traps with my skills, climb down a hole and drop into a black chamber where I can hear something shuffling about and breathing. Using sneak I'm able to navigate the room in the dark, and then pick the lock on the door on the otehr side in pure blackness - serious skills here! Once out I can't resist lighting the room up and of course it's got a basilisk in it. Only a luck test stops me being immediately petrified.
Next up I have to fight my own shadow, which I outfox by using my torch to disrupt it being cast by a sorcerous torch. Moving on I find a dead thief in the corridor - as I'm examining the corpse something blue and glowing, like a flaming ghost skull, comes whipping out of the darkness at me. I roll aside and it strikes the body, animating it and lurching to attack. Dead thieves make poor combatants, but as I dispatch it the ghostly spirit bleeds out of it and attacks me with an evil chuckle, attempting to possess me. Had I not had the magic sword from back in the skeleton lord's crypt I would be toast at this point, but there's literally no way to get here without getting past the bony menace so I win the battle, but this is a horrifically hard fight compared the reasonably easy ones so far. I then dodge a very obvious lure and a couple more traps (including a good one with rock grubs), fight an animated door (proving one shouldn't listen at every door one finds in a dungeon) and then battle a poisonous giant spider. By the end of this fight my provisions are looking pretty devastated..
I climb the spiders web, avoiding sticky strands and the corpses of other poor unfortunates and come up into another corridor, running with moisture and thick with mould. At the end of the corridor my spot hidden skill reveals a body, stuck to the wall and overgrown with fungus. There's also a door handle, and using my pick pocket skill I ease the handle round without disturbing the spores and fling myself through the door into the passages beyond.
The next bit is a maze, and I don't have a map, so am reduced to testing my luck to escape it. My luck is now all but exhausted so I neck my potion of fortune and eventually navigate my way to a room with a chest, a door, and two crystal statues of warriors, identical to the one from Caverns of the Snow Witch. Sure enough, one animates and attacks me.
Now at this point the book asks me if I'm using a stone axe. I do have a stone axe - I found it back in the skeleton crypt - but I've been using the super magic sword (there's been no indication before that I can fight with the axe) so I'm honest and say no. This means I have to fight the Skill 10 crystal warrior and -2 skill using the pommel of my sword as a weapon. Obviously, I lose and die. FAIL. I wasn't too impressed with that bit.
Annoyed, I 'reload', change to the axe and win the fight - barely - and pick the lock on the chest. This causes the chest to deliver a brutal electric shock to me and leaves me perilously close to death.
The chest contains a large flat disc of obsidian. My spot hidden skill shows it is resting on a silver wire that connects to the second crystal warrior, but I've got pick pocket so I Indiana Jones it and loot the disc before opening the door to see what lies beyond.
Final room! The Eye of the Basilisk is within, resting on a plinth and bathed in light. The book tells me there is likely a final trap and it is connected to the light. I hold up the disc, blocking the light, and whip the gem out from beneath it.
Trumphantly holding the gem I am horrified to see it is nothing but a worthless glass fake! But what's this? A secret door opens and out come all the thieves. "It was a trick all along!" they say "You've passed the test!" Thundercats ending-style laughter ensues. I've graduated... although personally I'd be pretty cheesed off to have undergone such an incredibly lethal test that surely kills 90% of those who attempt it. I guess in the city of thieves, the standard is set pretty high!


On the whole this wasn't a hugely difficult book - only took me four attempts once I'd figured out the skills you needed. The skills themselves aren't the fun Way of the Tiger style addition I thought they would be as some of them were essential and others seemed pretty useless. There's a real spike in difficulty at the end - for most of the books it seems a low skill can get you through with clever play but really, less than Skill 10 is likely to lead to death.
I really liked the first half when I was mucking about in the city, and it was also extremely forgiving by allowing me to double back and return to locations. It did a good job of portraying the mission and there were some cool references to City of Thieves and other books. Some of the bits that seemed a bit odd, like the beggars giving me stuff and the setup with the keys, made a lot of sense at the end once you know the concept of the test rather than, say, Resident Evil 2 where the police station has a bunch of random key puzzles in it. The second half of the book was basically a dungeon crawl and therefore significantly less interesting, although still neatly done with some good traps in it.

Art is by the excellent John Sibbick and as you'd expect its lovely stuff. The bulk of the pictures are scenery rather than monsters as it's not a very monster-y book, with a lot of them being first person perspective. It's all cool stuff.

Overall, I'd say this was a good book. It's different enough in its execution to overcome its weaker elements and it was simple enough to be a reasonably quick, yet not easy, play after some of the slogs I've done lately. Whilst I'd have preferred the book to all be heist, I still had fun playing it. Three and a half out of five Jib-Jibs.

[JohnW]

Trumphantly holding the gem I am horrified to see it is nothing but a worthless glass fake! But what's this? A secret door opens and out come all the thieves. "It was a trick all along!" they say "You've passed the test!"

If I'd been through all of that, only for my classmates to jump out shouting, "Surprise! It's only a bit of coloured glass!" they'd shortly become acquainted with my super magic sword and my stone hammer.
Some practical jokes just aren't funny.

[Barrington Boots]

I know, right? Thieves Guild? Bellends Guild more like.

[Barrington Boots]

Chasms of Malice

No writeup on this one, because it doesn't deserve one. I think I'd played this book before, and I definitely knew it by reputation and sadly that reputation was justified.

The book starts off with a good couple of pages detailing the setting of Khul and the people who live there - including the underground dwelling Gaddon or 'Feelbrethren' who migrated underground from the human kingdoms above due to religious persecution and now are blind but super-sensed up, like a race of Daredevils. The ancient evil has awoken as usual and you're the only one to stop it despite being a lowly kitchen worker due to your bloodline so you get given a sword and a cat and sent off to kill the villainous Orghuz. Is that Orghuz on the cover? Not sure because the book doesn't really decsribe him, and he doesn't ride a horse either, so probably not?

The book is insanely hard - riddled with luck tests and stamina penalties that make it impossible to get through without stunning dice rolls: if you don't run out of stamina you'll run out of luck, and pretty much every luck test is fatal if you fail it. There are also numerous random bits where you have to roll over or under your stamina to not die, or roll two dice and if the first one is higher you die (eg. rolling one dice for how stealthy you are and another for how deeply the guards are sleeping) or pick a random number to not die (such as when you have to choose a rank to stand in when infiltrating an army of orcs and then every second soldier gets thrown into a piranha pit)
The there's the absolute cherry on the top which is 'one strike combat'. This genius idea consists of rolling once for yourself and once for your enemy and the lowest roll is killed instantly. Sometimes you have to do this three or four times in a row.

It all adds up to a very unsatisfactory experience with death being seemingly impossible to avoid and the book becoming a horrendous slog. Even worse, the bulk of the book consists of wandering aimlessly around a number of tunnel networks, rooms of ledges with no real rhyme or reason as to which direction to take. The final part of the book, Orghuz's lair, is essentially a maze full of 'go left or right' type choices, with little context of clue and masses of auto-death paragraphs, quite often with all doors but one from any given room being an auto-death result. In the end I shelved my dice and resorted to outright cheating to finish the book. The ending isn't great, btw as the villain is unmemorable and the final passage is a 'hurray you won, the end' job.
The writing isn't the best with a lot of the paragraphs very short and clipped, encounters seemingly unlinked, giving a very random feel, and an odd slightly wry feel to some parts that, combined with the difficulty, gives the vague sense that the author is mocking the reader somewhat. It feels a bit like the sort of D&D dungeon I would have run when I was 11 and just wanted to fill rooms up with traps and monsters and random cool stuff instead of crafting a coherent experience for the player.
There's a couple of interesting ideas at the start - instead of a potion you're given a cat who functions as either a potion of luck or skill and can help you 8 other times, but there didn't seem to be many opportunities to use the cat, so this fell a bit flat. You're also given the names of the bad guys 7 lieutenants and can cross them off as you kill them. This sounds cool, but I only ever met one, and at the end you have to fight the (Skill 10) villain an extra time for every one you don't kill which isn't fun at all. Better is the cypher system used by the underground dudes that you can use to open magic doors - I'm not sure what happens if you don't get this, but I assume you die a lot.

It's not all terrible - Russ Nicholson is on art duties and draws a lot of orcs and goblins as fantastically as only he can. The book is also seemingly quite non-linear, as it has several routes to get to the final maze and there aren't really any items to pick up, meaning there's no point where you get to the end and die if you don't have x,y and z in your inventory.

Overall this is definitely in my bottom 5 for the books I've played so far!

[Richard]

Bloody hell, that book sounds desperately unfair!

[Barrington Boots]

It might be the worse one to date in terms of how it's constructed, although it might not be the worst one I've read so far - at least the art was nice, unlike Starship Traveller. It sounds like there's some pretty bad books to come though.

I've also got exactly 30 books left to read in the series (I'm not doing them all, I can't afford some of them!) I'll keep posting about them here until people stop reading it, I guess.