BQ02: Tunnels of Fear

Written by Stephen Thraves - Illustrated by Terry Oakes

Tunnels of Fear is another Thraves & Oakes collaboration, in what would be the final entry to the short-lived Battle Quest gamebook series. Despite being book number 2, this one is another standalone adventure just like Caves of Fury before it, which is a shame as it's the better of the two.

You play as a renowned adventurer, summoned by the Queen to help restore her poverty plagued kingdom back to its former glory. A curse has been placed over the kingdoms only steady source of income, the diamond mines to the north. This curse fills the tunnels and caverns with hideous demons and ferocious beasts, killing anyone who dares to extract the precious gems from within.

The Queen just asks that you venture into the mine and attempt to retrieve as many diamonds as you can, so they can heal the sick and feed the poor.

For once this actually makes logical sense and I think it's a fantastic motive to start off any adventure.

There's a lot of peripherals to go along with this one, password sheets, clear plastic overlays, those custom dice again from Caves of Fury. While some people tend to dislike all this extra "stuff" that's needed to play, I think it works nicely with the story. You find a spell or a book in the game and you get to use it in real life to help you overcome various puzzles and traps. Apart from them getting lost all the time, I cant see what's not to like?

The writing is actually pretty good, never venturing too far from the original theme. There's lots of good descriptive content to remind you that you're in a mine and not some old dungeon. Rickety wooden ladders, pulley systems, hand-cranked elevator's, rockfalls and cave-ins, it's all stuff you would expect to find in mine.

The descriptions of the enemy encounters are brilliant too, as are the fantastic pieces of artwork that accompany them. Sadly Thraves never bothered to name these creatures, possibly because as a lone barbarian warrior, you may have never seen these beasts before but it does come off as a bit lazy. Although it's at this point where I should bring up its biggest flaw.

The combat, just as it was in Caves of Fury, is rubbish, totally unfair and totally unsatisfying. Some of the encounters require 9 or more consecutive hits to take down whereas you only need to receive one wound to be forced to flee. The number of times I have been one hit away from victory, only to have to run away with my tail between my legs on the final roll is ridiculous.

After 3 attempts through the book playing by the rules, I decided (for my own sanity) that I was going to change it up a little. Here's the house rule I came up with:

When rolling a BLUE SWORD + RED FACE, instead of inflicting 1 DMG point to my opponent, I would count this as 2 DMG points instead. If I happen to roll a BLUE SHIELD + RED FACE, then I count this as 1 DMG point, think of it as a shield bash. Every other combination is counted as a miss or a block with no DMG being inflicted on either side.

To my surprise, this made the gamebook infinitely more enjoyable. Encounters still had that sense of risk that you could be forced to flee in just a single roll, but the combat, in general, felt a lot more balanced.

Of course, there are still a large number of traps that you could fall victim too, further reducing your strength score. On my 3rd playthrough, I finally managed to escape with 7 diamonds and only 1 point of strength remaining, and it felt great!

So even with my "enhanced" combat mechanics, it was still a hell of a challenge to make it through the book in one piece. It's actually making me want to revisit Caves of Fury using the same rules.

Overall, I think Tunnels of Fear is great! The writing, theme, plot, puzzles, and illustrations are all brilliant, it's just the unfair combat that lets it down. That being said, if your willing to compromise and bend the rules ever so slightly, you're left with a damn fine little adventure.


Reviewed by Harrison Marchant