A Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Adventure -- excuse me, Choose the Future -- book, featuring (among other things) sea monsters, zombies, and smugglers, and aimed, like most of the modern Doctor Who tie-ins, more at the kids who are the show's ostensible primary audience than at anyone else.

I've been a fan of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type books since their very beginning, and Doctor Who seems like it could lend itself really well to this kind of format. (Indeed, I have a couple of Doctor Who "game books" from the 80s that are basically just a slightly more sophisticated version of them, and I enjoyed those a lot. )

Unfortunately, this one does not live up to the potential. More than that, it completely screws up the structure. My first pass through, I somehow managed to miss all the opportunities to get some exposition, but it still dumped me out in the same place as if I had, so that my version of the Doctor was talking about things I hadn't learned and doing things I didn't even understand. Going back to re-visit the alternate choices I'd missed then proved to be an exercise in frustration. Mostly whatever choices you might make just lead you the same few places, often without much of anything interesting happening along the way, and even when you do get through it by taking the route the author apparently expects you to, the plot is still super thin, and the ending never feels quite supported by whatever went before it.

Rating: I almost never rate things this low, but I'm going to have to give this a 1.5/5. Look, if you're going to write a CYOA-style book, for crying out loud, at least make sure all the paths through the story work! ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3233521.html

As with Green's previous game book, The Horror of Howling Hill, this is set in southern England - 18th century Cornwall, to be precise - and is rather well written, capturing the Capaldi Doctor very well. It has several different storylines, most of which revolve around the Kraa'Kn (an aquatic alien monster, of course) with a galactic smuggler and a barmaid playing walk-on roles, but other variants include the Terileptils and a brief appearance of a clockwork robot. There are numerous endings, including one in which the Doctor is killed by zombies and another in which he is stuck in a perpetual time loop.

A structural gimmick which was new to me - at several points your choice is constrained by what has happened before, eg chapter 78:

- If the Doctor has already visited the Hispaniola Inn, go to 142.
- If not, go to 103.

This is a very interesting way of creating new lines through the structure. Unfortunately it's a bit too clever - there is a set of five chapters, starting with Chapter 12, which are orphaned (and I couldn't see where they were meant to fit - Chapter 12 starts with the Doctor heading toward the village with the smuggler, but no other chapter offers that as an option).

Anyway, more interesting than I expected. ( )