Jim Bambra

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.… (more)