To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure

OH MY GOD. This is the most entertaining book I've read in a long time-- a "Choose Your Own Adventure" version of Hamlet. Except way more fun than I remember any of those books actually being. You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or dead King Hamlet, trying to avenge the murder of King Hamlet. The book has a lot of fun mocking Hamlet; if you follow the "path" that Shakespeare himself did, the narrator constantly mocks you for your bad decisions. This is the only version of Hamlet that I know of not to omit the pirate battle. There is a part of the book where you are in a 1980s interactive fiction game ("look room"). If you play as Ophelia you get to invent central heating or participate in a dating simulator or play a death-chess match. If show more you play as King Hamlet you can use your ghost powers to revolutionize the world. If you play your cards right, you can even travel in time! And, best of all, The Murder of Gonzago is a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book within a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book! But if you die in the book, you die in real life! The delights just pour off the page again and again; if you are married, your spouse will tire of you telling them all the good bits. And so I will avoid telling you all the good bits, so you can discover them for yourself.

Also there is a picture for every possible ending, and they are delightful; a veritable cornucopia of webcomic artists provide them, from Jeph Jacques to Kris Straub, from Kate Beaton to Randall Munroe. (North himself writes a webcomic, but there's no art from him because that webcomic is Dinosaur Comics.) They're even in full color! You can get a lot of joy just paging through this and looking at the pictures.

I was so fascinated with the way this book works that I actually diagrammed it. (I think Ryan North sells diagrams, but that seems too easy. By the way, if you ever want to make a flowchart, yED Graph Editor is a great piece of free software; it was better than I could have imagined.) This gave me a new appreciation for the book, and the close reading it necessitated allowed me to uncover even more awesome features. Click on the link, if you dare. (Minor spoilers, I guess? If looking at a bunch of numbers is spoilers?) You will note the following:

• Shapes
• Squares = normal pages
• Ovals = endpoints
• Diamonds = normal pages within The Murder of Gonzago
• Colors
• Gray = outside the game
• Blue = Hamlet
• Yellow = Ophelia
• Orange = dead King Hamlet
• Green = Claudius
• Purple = Horatio
• Parts of the book that I think of as "minigames" (tightly networked sets of small choices) are clustered into boxes.
• The path marked with skull logos (the path of the original play) is the thick line.
• Pg. 195 is where you go if you take the choice to actually kill Claudius. You will note that you get that choice a lot. But for some reason you never do it!

I mean, look at that thing. It's incredible! What an intricate achievement. When North crowdfunds Romeo and/or Juliet, I will be ready with my money. show less

Yes, here it is. William Shakespeare's greatest work in the form it was always meant to take: a Choose Your Own Adventure story! Er, sorry, make that a "chooseable-path" story. We don't want to get sued, after all.

But whatever you call it, it offers you the opportunity to choose your own Hamletty adventure. You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or (briefly) the king's ghost, and make decisions about where the story goes. Have you always wanted to force Hamlet to just get on with killing Claudius already? No problem! Turn to page 195! Then again, depending on what kinds of actions you take, he might end up taking up a life of piracy instead. Or falling out of a window. There are a lot of endings involving Hamlet falling out of a window. Also show more a surprising number in which Ophelia just straight-up murders everybody.

It's all highly entertaining, filled with silly humor, little games-within-games, and colorful full-page illustrations (one for each possible ending). It also pokes a lot of fun at the original, but as someone who genuinely loves the play, I found it all mostly pretty hilarious. Although not nearly as hilarious as the moment when I found myself trying to dispose of Polonius's body by eating it. Does it make me a bad person if that made me laugh so hard I started to have trouble breathing?

You can also play this in computer game form, too, by the way, although that format does rob you of the fun of flipping pages back and forth and marking all the choices you want to revisit with a small blizzard of post-it notes. Although it probably does make it easier to read with a cat on your lap and a mug of coffee in one hand. That was a bit of a struggle for me, I'll admit. show less

So I knew this was going to be funny. Ryan North is a funny guy. I knew it'd have silly but exciting things like dinosaurs and pirates and science fiction things and probably some time travel too. I also knew that there'd be lots of jabs at and nostalgia for the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s. And all that's in there.

But it's much better than that. Ryan pulls off some remarkable feats of cleverness that are only possible in this format. There are gimmicks and jokes that could only work in a gamebook*. Even if you just read straight through the Shakespeare version of the story (helpfully guided by little drawings of skulls**), without cheating, looking ahead, backtracking, bookmarks, or anything like that, North still show more manages to find ways to use the medium in clever ways.

Of course, if you AREN'T doing any cheating, you're going to miss out on half the fun. Unlike the original gamebooks, To Be Or Not To Be takes into account the fact that you will in fact "cheat," by keeping a thumb on a page and look ahead to see what this ridiculous option will lead to, by looking at certain pages without actually being told to do so, etc. And there are lots of surprises waiting for you when you do.

North clearly loves the original work, but he doesn't shy away from pointing out and playing with the problems and idiosyncrasies of the original work, including small curiosities (who poisons someone through their EAR?), issues related to the attitudes of the time it was written (Ophelia's role here is MUCH more important than it ever was in the original), and major oversights that seem inexplicable in hindsight (why does the most exciting scene (the pirate battle) only get a few lines of description?).

And the art for many of the endings is simply delightful. For me, they added an extra fun game where I tried to guess which artist had drawn them, given that so many of those who created art for the book are webcomic artists that I'm already familiar with.

*That's the generic term for Choose Your Own Adventure books, since Choose Your Own Adventure is trademarked.

**And even the little drawings of skulls that signpost the "official" version of the story show lots of variety and cleverness. show less

A riff on Hamlet and choose your own adventure books, North plays with Shakespeare's classic and makes it uproariously funny. Beginning with your initial choice of being Ophelia, Hamlet, or Hamlet's father, there's plenty of entertaining endings to explore. Whether it's Ophelia ditching Hamlet and fighting terrorists on her vacation or Hamlet actually killing Claudius instead of dithering or Hamlet Sr. figuring out just how to be a ghost, there's plenty of different ways to explore the plot that are more or less faithful to the original play. Fun and funny, this is a great book to flip through or to systematically explore every possible way of dying (or living) you can get. Honourable mention to the gorgeous illustration pages included show more on the end pages for every story arc as they're beautiful and done by a wide variety of artists (including personal favourites Kate Beaton and Noelle Stevenson). show less

Funny and irreverent, this is what reading Shakespeare would be like if Hamlet were a comedy RPG. Play as either Hamlet, Ophelia, or Hamlet Sr. Delightful modern anachronisms and snarky narration add to the joy. This book is perfect for Shakespeare fans who can laugh a little at some of his characters’ more foolish decisions, or for anyone who has ever felt a little bit frustrated with the Bard. If you don’t like how one adventure ends, go back and choose another. Quirky and fun.

Choose your own adventure Hamlet. Simple concept, really, yet wonderfully complex. There are over a hundred endings, each with its own illustration. Reading this book is like playing a game, and I’m very happy to note that game-play can continue for hours at a stretch, while at the same time being interruptible. I can read for a bit to one of the endings and pick it back up a few days later starting at the beginning (or any one of the points where my story split the last time around) and it feels fresh. I can even play as Ophelia or the Ghost of King Hamlet. Instead of a play-within-a-play to highlight Claudius’ guilt, we have a choosable-path-book-within-a-choosable-path-book. I really can’t imagine anything better.

Ryan North show more makes it easy for the reader who wants to follow the original path set by Shakespeare by marking it with little skulls. Doing this really highlights just how poor a decision-maker Hamlet really was. Clearly, I can do better. That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad this book exists: so I can fix Hamlet.

Did you know that Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern went on a boat to England, were attacked by pirates, survived the attack, and returned to Denmark? I’ve read the play and seen one of the film versions a couple of times, and still did not remember this part. At all. This is likely because Shakespeare only devoted a line or two to the whole thing. That’s obviously a flaw in the Bard’s judgement there. Ryan North corrects this by expanding the pirate scenes, for which we should all thank him.

Basically, this book is an absolute necessity for everyone, whether you are a Shakespeare fan or not. Go buy it or find it at your local library. show less

If only all Shakespeare could be this much fun! This chooseable-path adventure is entertaining and never-ending. Well, it will end, time and time again. Don’t like the ending you just got? Go back and make different choices! There are no wrong answers – how cool is that?! If you do make a less than stellar decision, the author will gently steer you in the right direction. The great illustrations that are liberally sprinkled in the text just adds to the enjoyment of your journey. You can follow Shakespeare’s plot, but it is definitely more fun to veer from the normal path. Be daring! And remember, the path you take may be better than Shakespeare’s!