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YARD Mon Sep 18 13:33:56 2023 A Flame In The North |
Less important weirdness:
SPOILER
And some continuity.
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With these comments out of the way, I'll concur with everyone else that this is very much a worthy follow-up to A Shadow in the North, one which retains its strengths and improves upon it as well. The city really is in a desperate situation, as you can see even from afar, with the rain of ash at 101. Once inside, the numerous times you can stumble into traps (or at least tricks/shakedowns) laid by the seemingly friendly characters only underscore that. Same goes for even more minor details, like the way herbalist’s stall is laid out at 159. The "taxation" option, and the response to it, is excellent. And I am not even getting into the "core" encounters required to either escape or to mitigate Necromancer's hordes. Perhaps the only exception is that 110 feels surprisingly idealistic. |
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YARD Mon Sep 18 13:43:46 2023 A Flame In The North |
I should also say that the Talrasian Mage/Defender is a much better defined protagonist now, and his dialogue/internal monologue is actually pretty great when you make the right choices. More importantly, even many of the wrong/less-desirable choices have internal monologue that is convincing, which is no easy thing to do. In general, the addition of a timer, with quite a range of options being "feel-good" but offering you nothing substantial and taking up time, is certainly a step forward from there being effectively no benefits to avoiding rest and speeding along in the first part (other than that one time you get ambushed for more STAMINA than if you had just walked through the night.) There's clearly been more of an effort to add modifiers and such to battles as well: while they can sometimes go a bit too far (i.e. the Wraiths up until you guess the one option which works the best on them), when they work well (i.e. Acolytes of the Blade). it stands out. (And also makes the ways you get to bypass those encounters, like the really awesome one at 277, all the more precious.) Further, I was already impressed how even the goblin army in A Shadow in the North actually thought through military tactics properly (in fact, they were smarter than the Wildlings/Starks in A Game of Thrones, never letting their prized trolls go anywhere without armour, while Wun Wun was infamously wasted in a completely predictable manner), but the Necromancer's army takes this much, much further. The only exception, ironically, is the Titan: the one time where "game" REALLY visibly overpowers "book", and the logic of power curve (bosses must be last) overwhelms the military logic (there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON not to send out the Titan first, since it is literally completely useless outside of a siege or a massive pitched battle, while the basic ghouls, the fancier chitinous creatures and especially the fliers have far, FAR greater day-to-day utility, and all are wasted pointlessly if a Titan can do the job either way.) That aside, the siege is still an awesome moment: while Hunger of the Wolf also had a pretty good one, with similar mechanics, this is clearly on another level. Unfortunately, it seems extremely unlikely that we are ever going to get A Light in the North nowadays, almost a decade since these two instalments. It reminds me of a story you probably don't know of (but really should): a free RPG Maker game called A Blurred Line - that one had a more sci-fi/science fantasy setting, but it was also quite dark, and remarkable for having a substantially branching plot, particularly for a JRPG-style game. Like here, it was only done to about two-thirds, and the final third is over 20 years past the initially promised date. I wonder if for both of these cases, it's the same issue as what befell Berserk and A Song of Ice and Fire - the authors started out without too many ambitions, and readily embraced genre conventions along the way, but once they got going, they became so engrossed in the worlds they made, that to write out an ending which everyone could see from the start, an ending which the genre conventions they used as building blocks had demanded, began to feel like an unthinkable chore rather than as a triumphal conclusion, and so it never happened. Perhaps the parallels with Dark Souls and with The Banner Saga (which is much more group-focused, yet follows practically the same structure of "journey-capital city siege-cleanse heart of darkness") ended up weighing too much. Or perhaps it was the dreaded logic of the power curve again: how do you top fighting a hydra, a Titan and winged undead beings, in addition to the elementals and wyrms of the first part? |
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YARD Mon Sep 18 13:47:01 2023 A Flame In The North |
And now, proofreading. Split into sets once again.
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YARD Mon Sep 18 13:48:51 2023 A Flame In The North |
The other set.
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YARD Mon Sep 18 14:08:42 2023 A Shadow In The North |
Haviing finished A Flame in the North, I must now note that it spells that one character's name as Xenophon in ref 43, even though a slight majority of the refs here use Xenophont. Make of that what you will. And couple more typos, present in the options I didn't remember to check until now.
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YARD Tue Sep 19 06:46:25 2023 Devil's Flight 
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Well, I had pretty high expectations for this after Soul Tracker, which I enjoyed quite a lot, and knowing that this was written some time after. Promisingly, it also has no names like Drago Darkheart, though naming your ship a Norwegian word for Devil is almost equally on the nose. Unfortunately, I found this to be a real disappointment altogether. I would go as far as to say that I hated it by the point I won for the first time, but then checking out the other, dead-end options helped to redeem it somewhat. One of the issues is actually to do with the way it was adapted. I downloaded the text version to check, and saw that you had TEN FEAR points. Having finished the whole thing, I agree with the earlier comments that's too much, but reducing it to just 4 FEAR points goes way too far in the other direction. In practice, it means that on one of the two paths, your Astro-Geologist keels over and dies after seeing just a couple of dead bodies (yes, I know you are supposed to minimize your exposure to them to win), unless you chug basically all of that Neuroxin almost immediately, and it just feels wrong - not scary, but merely annoying and implausible. I think it would be way better to have it at 6 points, but make a few more events give FEAR points. I.e.
SPOILER
However, the more fundamental issue is that you are an Astro-Geologist, you were sent out to investigate a ship where, as you are told in the very first ref, potentially every system could be broken...and you go ahead and do that WITHOUT EVEN A FLASHLIGHT, without rubber-insulated gloves (according to ref 105), and, more importantly, WITH NO OXYGEN MASK OF ANY KIND, even though by far the most plausible reason for what happened to the ship is that it suffered a breach and/or air purification broke? A whole instakill skill check only exists because of this stupidity, as well as one of the ways to get captured for a midway encounter, one which REALLY doesn't justify all the railroading leading up to it.
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As I said, it's unfortunate that not only is there only one path to victory, but it's the path that's a lot less interesting and altogether worse-written. It involves more crew interaction (particularly on the dead-end paths) and it feels so constrained. I.e.
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It also has what might be the worst-detailed ref - ref 134. Mounted on what? Drops down through what? Was it loud or quiet? Is that normal for ships like that to have that kind of thing, or is it jury-rigged? You don't really get many answers. |
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YARD Tue Sep 19 06:49:09 2023 Devil's Flight |
One thing I do like is that you cannot render yourself completely safe to any skill checks. I had a run where the virtual dice have really hated me, and so even with 10 Perception and Cybernetics, I still failed three of those checks in a row. For a horror game, that feels appropriate, and the ultimately optimal build to maximize your odds of victory
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is just the right kind of counter-intuitive. Proofreading:
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YARD Wed Sep 20 04:09:31 2023 Bodies In The Docks
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I have to be honest, I think this might be the most overrated work on here. After all, it is the only one which is explicitly mentioned in the FAQ, which does raise the expectations for it, rightly or wrongly. I guess that at the time, it benefited from a massive novelty factor, since there was next to no interactive media based on Lovecraft then: even Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was still about a year away, and apparently, there were only really Infogrames' Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of the Ice. Granted, the great Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was already out in 2002, but as a lesser-known game on a lesser-known console and strictly speaking, it was "inspired by", rather than directly based on. Nowadays, though, we have seen a veritable boom in Lovecraft media during the second half of the 2010s, and that includes more video games I can name. The most famous ones, of course, is another "inspired by" console exclusive, Bloodborne, followed by Darkest Dungeon, but there have been plenty more works mining the mythos directly with variable degrees of success, such as the more modern Call of Cthulhu, The Sinking City, Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, Lovecraft's Untold Stories, Moons of Madness or the freely available Infra Arcana. I could keep going indefinitely, as there are literally dozens more examples: just a few months ago, there was a highly acclaimed Lovecraftian fishing game called DREDGE. My point is that with this benefit of hindsight, there's just so little to it. Some of the issues with it could probably be blamed on being intended as part of a trilogy that never came to be: hence a substantial fraction of skills being potentially useful in the future yet useless in the here and now. By my estimation, Chemistry, Biology, Navigation and Acute Hearing/Eyesight all fall into this category, while Brawling and Driving are right next to them, since they only seem to have any influence on a completely skippable encounter, and even then, not having them barely impedes your progress. If you are feeling generous, some others may be written off on the internet still being young and less-useful for doing research at the time: i.e. it's pretty obvious Simon Osborne chose Portsmouth because its name matched Innsmouth the closest, and didn't look much further into it, but I am not sure if it would have been all that easy to bring up Portsmouth's historical maps back in 2004 as it was in 2019, when Yaztromo did that and proved that Portsmouth's actual geography makes the story impossible. Similarly, ref 83 mentions ammo smuggling: much of the German ammunition wasn't even compatible in the first place (i.e. 7.92mm bullets vs. 7.62mm), but I am not sure if it was as easy to look it up in 2004 as it is now. Many other issues are just bad design, however. I.e. it's equally ridiculous that Knife Use gives you a whole MACHETE, which apparently no-one minds seeing on the belt of your detective/doctor/gangster, and yet, the only difference between that, and being completely bare-handed, is whether you enter melee combat at -3 or -2 modifier, while Cultists' knives are at +1? REALLY?! And it also seems like there's absolutely no point in taking a Handgun skill, since you can always just take an Elephant Gun (or a Tommy Gun, I guess) and there is no apparent downside - not in the tight quarters, not in terms of ammo (infinite for all weapons), and no-one seems to mind you walking all over the place with those massive firearms. It was funny when at 86, your coat gets taken, and your Tommy Gun is just out in the open, which nobody minds, but this is even funnier with the Elephant Gun. Integrating firearms into FF is quite a struggle, to be sure, but gun-wielders taking a shot or two at most and then charging into the fray for literally no reason (whether during the ambush on the beach, when it's the cultists who do that, or the next potential fight, where it's YOU who decides to charge a knife-wielding cultist even if you do not have a melee weapon) is a particularly arbitrary way of doing that. Then again, it's also arbitrary that both those first two cultists and the third one seem to be equipped with the same kind of knife, yet you can only loot it from the third cultist - apparently that was the only way to make that encounter seem worthwhile. |
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YARD Wed Sep 20 04:56:06 2023 Bodies In The Docks |
To be fair, this work does do one thing very well, and that is in its descriptions of urban decay and post-WWI malaise. I think only a few works here (Outsider!, The Ravages of Fate, The Word Fell Silent, Flame in the North and perhaps The Diamond Key once I get to it) can claim a comparable level of insight. Unfortunately, though, a large fraction of that can only be seen in the skippable branches (i.e. if you take the train on one attempt and drive on the other, if you see all three of the town's inns, and if you go to the police station, the doctor, the bar, or the docks), and the main path is MUCH less interesting, as you really only need to do ONE thing to finally start fighting the cultists. Worse, unlike many other works on here, where optional encounters give items or information that directly benefits you on the main path, here, it's all irrelevant. In fact, those encounters actually make cohesion WORSE, as they are ignored on the main path. I.e.
SPOILER
And there's a lot more weirdness if you either do things in a slightly different order than intended, or just pay more attention than the author himself apparently did.
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YARD Wed Sep 20 05:02:57 2023 Bodies In The Docks |
I should also say that while the internal monologue is pretty great on the optional paths, it crosses over into outright frustrating on the main.
SPOILER
Last not least, proofreading.
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Aditya Wed Sep 20 11:15:42 2023 Escape The Asylum
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BANGER OF A PLOT |
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MPerera Thu Sep 21 05:05:01 2023 A Day In The Life
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Short but fun! |
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YARD Thu Sep 21 14:29:35 2023 House Of Horror
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Excellent! It's a little hard to talk at length about what makes this work so good, because on the first glance, it is after all, "just" a story about a guy trapped in a mansion worshipping an evil demon. Yet, it is remarkably well-balanced: great pacing (it doesn't even take that long to work out how to get to the "second-best" failure ending), good scene-setting writing (ref 11 is an exception, being rather too straightforward), and consistently interesting encounters. This includes both the obstacles, and the more talkative characters. In particular, I dreaded approaching the room with Aldo and Anna because (ghostly) kids are often a one-note chore in horror, yet it's a surprisingly great moment! The best character was definitely Anselmo, though, and I doubt I was the only who thought that way! I really like that this story was unafraid to have a bit of humour like that football fan, and actually make it work within the context of the story. (Which still features plenty of unexpected pain like what your character can suffer at 405, or ref 79.) Likewise, I LOVE refs 23 and 144. That kind of a bait is bit of a low blow, I guess, but is still hilarious. Even more so when considering you literally need meta knowledge from failed runs to win - and the writing itself acknowledges that. Yet, the difficulty felt just about right altogether - I won this without having to resort to checking the guestbook (let alone "right-clicking"/bookmarking), and I really don't think this should be marked as the same difficulty as Phil Sadler's two gamebooks. Perhaps it's just me getting better at these things, but then again, Golem Gauntlet (also marked "hard" here) was one of the first ones I have beaten, and I have also done that without hints. Both of them can be won just through the process of eliminating wrong options (although Golem Gauntlet does feature some brutal skill checks), and neither has ANYTHING like the requirement to USE a limited resource at very specific refs to win - a resource which can be wasted pointlessly, or even in a way which seems to benefit you only to fail later on (Metal Sentinel, anyone?) Not to mention that neither has anywhere near that many trap items, or the ability to exchange quest-crucial items for useless ones without knowing the difference. Perhaps a "very hard" category just for the Hellfire/Riders of the Storm pair is in order? Anyway, for this work, if there's a particular flaw with the writing, I would say it's how our character is an insurance agent or something, yet his emotional response to fighting and killing others in combat is about the same as that of basically all the hardened adventurers of Titan (i.e. none.) A very common flaw to be sure, but I still feel the need to mention that. There are also a few moments where the writing feels a little constrained, but thankfully a lot less than in most comparable works. I.e.
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A few mechanical issues.
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YARD Thu Sep 21 14:33:37 2023 House Of Horror |
Finally, proofreading.
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YARD Thu Sep 21 16:21:07 2023 The Curse Of Drumer
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I have played this right after a House of Horror, almost as a double feature of a sort. After all, both are related to the same canon gamebook, House of Hell. I'll say that reading the comments here after beating this might be the most mystified I have ever felt on here. One reason was all the discussion about a really simple puzzle early on, (though it seems like it used to be worse than it is right now?) and effectively nothing about everything else in those early stretches. To me, this work is almost every bit as as the House of Horror is good, and nearly everything redeeming about it comes way down the line. The background and early refs in this one are effectively the absolute worst out of every gamebook I have seen here - and by now, that's nearly all of them. For starters, we literally do not know anything about his friends, Scott and Jimmy from that background and have no idea what that "important meeting" at a ruined house was meant to be about. All we see is the player character doing something obviously idiotic, yet we are supposed to care? The later revelation that they were all crims somewhat explains the venue, yet it effectively means that the protagonist blurted out the location of their secret criminal meeting to everybody at the pub, for zero good reason, so it at best replaces one idiocy with another. We never really learn why those two decided to pick that specific spot, or why they chose to arrive there days earlier, so all of Jimmy's whining rings particularly hollow. Then, FF struggles to integrate guns at the best of times, for sure, but the approach here is even more arbitrary than that of Bodies in the Docks. The first proper action scene, at 181, is an accidental masterclass in incoherence. At the start, we are told that there are "a dozen" cultists (i.e. 12 at most, including the leader.) Yet, by the time we run past ALL OF THEM to the Land Rover, there are only two in the vicinity and a dog (which we shoot through our own windscreen, yet it apparently does not die.) We shoot one point-blank, the other one manages to struggle for control of the shotgun, the missed shot from shatters the leg of what is apparently another acolyte (since the first one would already be dead?). Then, you somehow manage to hold onto the shotgun with one hand (even while the acolyte is pulling at it with two?) as you are unsheathing a knife that is now at your belt (even though the preceding ref 98 only mentions it being in your bag, and doesn’t describe you clipping it on) and stabbing with it. Then, you are pushing that guy who is heavily wounded in the stomach into a charging acolyte. (Which charging acolyte? Presumably not the one you shot point-blank or the one whose leg was shattered) So, we somehow go from dozen cultists, to two, to at least four, of whom three would be dead or incapacitated by them (while the high priest is just...forgotten about). Further, you STILL have 13 shotgun shells left at that point - more than there are cultists you could see, and apparently, none of them had any guns! Yet, instead of doing the reasonable thing and shooting them all, you "keep the smoking barrel trained in their general direction whilst darting back towards the relative safety of the ruins". Relative safety FROM WHAT?! If you are the only one who has the gun, for whatever reason, (since nobody shot at you while you were running to Land Rover in the first place - although some cultists do use guns later on), then out in the open you have range to use it. Someone had already tried to grab at your gun once, and the ruins would only give more chances to do just that. This incredible looseness with setting out the parameters of each encounter (something which the subsequent Robert Douglas works were MUCH better at), makes the chase scenes afterwards feel nonsensical. You, a guy with a shotgun, and Jimmy, can end up hiding in a skull pit from three guys and a demon dog (of course, if you fail, you suddenly get instakilled with a crossbow). There's also a passageway narrow enough for you to shoot at them one by one if you tried - but you have to flee regardless. Yet, later on, you HAVE to fight six guys at once in melee, in the darkness, and you apparently win. It's just totally nonsensical. Some, initial, aversion to killing COULD help explain this: after all, a criminal doesn't mean a murderer (and committing a lone murder and standing and shooting at a crowd are different things anyway). It doesn't, though, since that's the one thing the protagonist clearly DOESN'T feel. It takes until ref 10, more than halfway into the story, for our character to make ANY comment about anyone he just killed - and it's about the least sympathetic torturer cultist, to (justifiably) say he doesn't care. If you avoid taking a shotgun (you shouldn't) you can get a scene where he beats a cultist to death with a flashlight, with a hilarious lack of emotion. |
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YARD Thu Sep 21 17:16:22 2023 The Curse Of Drumer |
For that matter, that scene is also a hot mess: ref 265 says you have a torch from the start, yet you instead fight with a torch the cultist dropped, after trying to stab (?) you with it, instead of just attacking with a dagger immediately, like he does after losing the torch anyway. (And no, I have to assume the torch was electric, since you get the same reference to "flickering" regardless of whether or not you have a flashlight, and while holding both a shotgun and a flashlight is iffy, I don't even want to think about the mechanics of holding a shotgun and a wooden torch.) Meanwhile, if you have a shotgun, then the only reason the torturer survives for long enough to be killed later on (unless you fail a sudden LUCK and SKILL check, which is all too possible, and one of the biggest barriers to lower-stat characters here) is because he manages to survive a shotgun blast by hiding behind a brazier then kicking it in your direction. Apparently, a brazier is not only bulletproof, but isn't going to wobble and spill any hot coals after getting shot at whatsoever, unlike when it's kicked. Similarly, your shotgun apparently has a range of 6 meters or so (I'll let you look up real-life ranges yourself) as you do not even TRY to shoot at a high priest when he is close enough to converse with you without difficulty. As I said, the narrative logic around firearms didn't seem to go remotely beyond "blasting cultists with big gun cool!" You do have to go through a SKILL check every time you shoot, though, just like in Bodies in the Docks (wouldn't be surprised if it was a direct inspiration.) The difference is that Bodies in the Docks didn't have scenes like ref 338 here
SPOILER
- ALL OF WHICH happens without a single skill check. The difference between that, and a skill check fest that is the shootout with two fireball-flinging flying demons (who somehow continue to toss two fireballs at once, which must be dodged individually, even AFTER you destroyed one of them already) is very apparent. This doesn't have THAT big of an issue with long choice-free stretches when compared to most other Douglas' works, but these "pure Hollywood" refs where the character suddenly stops needing the dice and carries out feats many times more complex than the ones he just needed skill checks moments earlier, on autopilot, are incredibly out of place. It doesn't help that pretty much as soon as you are out of the mansion's ruins (which happens quite quickly), and find characters in addition to Jimmy, the dialogue is either exposition or incredibly cringeworthy sub-Whedonite banter all the time. Jimmy at first stands in place and has a breakdown over father's death while cultists are trying to break through the door, then forgets effectively ALL about it and his personality is reduced to saying "bonnie" in EVERY OTHER SENTENCE. Unfortunately, out of the two paths to victory, it is the far more obvious one that brings you into contact with more people and forces you to suffer through far more dialogue and plot holes. The other path is just much, much better narratively, though it is sadly much less hospitable to characters without max SKILL, and still has some weirdness (317 instakills you even if you DO have the weapon which works in all the "adjacent" refs?) |
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YARD Thu Sep 21 17:30:51 2023 The Curse Of Drumer |
On the other hand, the "main path" is just completely illogical. To wit:
SPOILER
Then again,
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YARD Thu Sep 21 17:50:58 2023 The Curse Of Drumer |
And of course, proofreading.
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YARD Thu Sep 21 17:56:30 2023 House Of Horror |
I suppose I also want to say that ref 333 arguably sets up a bit of a false expectation. You know, the ref with this paragraph. "The books are set in a plain black binding. They are written in a strange, unfamiliar language, somewhat similar to Latin, as far as you can tell. Flipping through the pages, you spot several disturbing illustrations - faceless beings, writhing on the ground as if in great pain; an opened box with a whirlpool of ghastly clawed things (demons?) springing out; and one of a robed man holding a star shaped crystal that seems to be shooting out a bolt of searing light straight at a group of hideous and evil looking beings standing nearby." From that, I really assumed that
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Robert Douglas Thu Sep 21 21:23:53 2023 The Curse Of Drumer |
Hello YARD, Thanks for giving The Curse of Drumer a read. It's good to see enthusiasm from fellow fans, and constructive criticism is indeed welcome, in particular regarding gameplay and mechanics. It is important to get a balance. However, speaking of balance, you do yourself need to observe a certain degree of decorum with far less frustration when listing aspects which need work or improvement. While I do understand your reading TCOD required several hours of your time, please remember planning and writing a standard 400-ref gamebook is at least ten times that amount. Furthermore, while it is done voluntarily, as a hobby, authors contributing to this website are not paid, unlike those within FF, Lone Wolf, and other series. While I'm absolutely fine with that, barbed reviews sting far more on here than on, for example, an Amazon listing - because at least the author is getting paid for their time and trouble. And a customer has a right to feel annoyed when spending a fiver or so on a book they ended up not enjoying. But even world-famous, wealthy paid artists (authors, illustrators, actors, rocks stars, etc) can struggle with difficult reviews. The late, great comedian Les Dawson mentioned in an interview that, during his early stage years, he received some hurtful comments - when his only 'crime' was to make people laugh - and not many were supportive nor positive towards his career in any way. That you were 'mystified' by comments made by other FF fans in this thread, the answer is really quite simple: most of them enjoyed TCOD for what it was, while you clearly didn't. Fair enough! But if you can do any better, then please, go ahead and show us how it's done.... |
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