Stephen Hand (2)

I've had a brief go at this one before, both as an adult and a child, but haven't had any luck, so it was a joy to complete it last night. This book is better than I remembered and the horror aspects work well. Lots of grisly demonic stuff. I picked my special skills well, (Heal / Meditation / Detect Demon) and they all seemed to come in useful. There don't seem to be any skills without which you will lose, which is good. The Evil Points mechanism didn't make any difference to me, I only clocked up 2 in the whole game, but perhaps I am naturally a 'good' alignment person :D This is a well plotted and planned book, and whilst i think there has been some sharp editing for length (i.e. some of the references could have done with longer explanations or exposition to ensure they didn't feel rushed) it felt complete and satisfying. There were some good set pieces, geographical horror straight out of 80s weird horror. There were no impossible battles, even the final battle with the demon price Myurr and its SKILL of 14 was mitigated by the Demon Slayer Sword which I had just found. Without it you will struggle unless you know where its Crystal of Whatever is hidden and destroy it quickly. If anything this one might be too easy for those players who seek complexity and want a gamebook that requires replaying time and time again. IMO few of those gamebooks are well written enough to make you want to do that! This is definitely one of the upper tier of Fighting Fantasy so worth checking out.… (meer)

A curious one this. In general this is a good fighting fantasy book. I enjoyed the city exploration, it all felt very fresh whilst still being traditional. There was plenty of humour in there without being a comedy adventure, or wacky. It was hard without being impossible. It featured a cypher that I found completely incomprehensible (anyone who wants to explain it to me feel free). It existed nicely within existing geographical / historical Titan but still felt new. All in all, not a bad one at all. But the route I took never revealed what a Moonrunner was until the very last stage, and then there wasn't really any exposition about why it was such a bad thing! Actually I think the whole thing felt heavily edited, it could have done with some more background about the evil wizard you're tracking down and all their naughty ways. Still, I enjoyed it a lot and stayed up far too late playing it!… (meer)