CAG01: Shadows of Doom

Written by Stephen Thraves - Illustrated by Terry Oakes

I really love the compact size of this gamebook, all you need is a pencil, no dice, no cards it really is a pocket-sized adventure.

Its kind of light on the story side of things but at least makes your quest fairly straight forward, just find 6 gems and get out of the dungeon alive.

What sets this apart from other fantasy gamebooks is the combat system. Every encounter gives you a random selection of coordinates and each round of combat you have to choose one and cross-reference it with the combat table in the front or the back of the book. This leads to 3 possible outcomes.

Either your weapons will clash and no damage will be done to either side. If you're lucky you'll defeat the enemy in one barbaric swing or if you're unlucky, you'll be wounded and have to flee. If you take too many wounds then youll die. It's a fairly simple system.

Sadly it means that combat is nothing more than a lottery, there's no skill involved and you could just remember all of the winning numbers.

The artwork and writing, however, do make up for the weak fighting mechanics, interesting puzzles and characters will crop up all over the place and there's a large number of alternative routes through the book so multiple playthroughs are highly recommended, and to be honest i think you'll need to play it a few times to find all of the gems.

My only real complaint is the ending, it's literally just the words "Well Done". All that work and not even a few paragraphs to finish off the story.

There's a load of much better gamebooks out there, almost all of the Fighting Fantasy books will trump this but it's still not a bad little adventure. Yes, its held back by some quirky mechanics and that ending is borderline unacceptable for a piece of interactive fiction. 

But overall it's still good fun to play through, and really, that's all that matters in the end.


Reviewed by Harrison Marchant