Genre:
Fantasy
Description:
A sea
voyage to trade spices with a distant land promised great fortunes
for you and your friends. However, a vessel flying a pirate standard
had other ideas. How well can you deal with the unexpected? Find
out in this create-your-own adventure!
Author:
Dominic
O’Reilly lives in Manchester, England and has many temporary jobs,
all including the typing up of very mundane, and totally
uninteresting, information. When he needs to escape from the
mundane, he writes. The genre depends on his mood at the moment.
Dominic has a blog you can visit and also a page at Deviant Art.
Appraisal:
Anyone
remember Zork,
one of the first interactive computer adventure games? I do. I
played it while I was in college on one of those ancient Apple
computers – back before they were Macs, back before they came in
colors. Way back… And I loved it. It was my first experience
with just how addictive a computer can be. Well, I think that this
author probably grew up with Zork,
and loved it, too.
I spent
about 45 minutes gleefully building my own adventure and snickering
to myself and thinking “Boy, this is just like Zork!” OK, I
admit it… I wasn’t able to accomplish much except to wander
around in a circle picking up herbs and offering a guard some very
odd bribes. But neither was I ever able to do much of anything in
Zork, and that didn’t stop me, nor did it dim my enjoyment.
This book
has the same snarky, tongue-in-cheek humor – usually at your
expense. The baddies aren’t really bad – just offer them a
potion that you were able to have mixed up by one of the witches on
the heath using herbs that you picked up while walking in circles,
and they’ll be your friends. The pirates steal your cargo, but
they don’t kill you – it’s much more fun to watch as you walk
in circles picking up herbs and encountering odd characters. There
are bandits with spiky clubs, but their aim isn’t any better than
your prowess with a sword is. Everything’s all in good fun.
The book
has 3 chapters, and if I understand it correctly, you can ‘save’
your adventure, when you inevitably end up getting killed, by jumping
to the next chapter (as opposed to starting over). So, in effect,
you get three ‘lives’. I’ve read a few ‘create your own’
adventure Kindle books, and this is more elaborate, with a greater
number of options than the others I’ve read (not to mention having
a much more wicked sense of humor).
Highly
recommended, if you have a good sense of humor, and even more so if
you can remember playing Zork.
FYI:
This is
very family-friendly. The humor is snide, but not mean. The
‘baddies’ are bad in name only. Even getting killed is an
opportunity for the author to poke fun at the reader.
Added
for Reprise Review: Witches
and Bandits and Swords was a
nominee in the Fantasy category for B&P 2014 Readers' Choice
Awards. Original review ran May 24, 2013.
Format/Typo
Issues:
In all the
jumping around I did during my game, I saw only one minor typo, so
I’d say formatting is excellent. On the Kindle, the links to
select the next scenario work perfectly, and some are worth a laugh
in themselves.
Rating:
***** Five stars
Reviewed
by: SingleEyePhotos
Approximate
word count: (varies – this
is a create-your-own adventure)
1 comment:
Thanks a lot for reprising your review of this. It's the only good review I've had (the only review, full stop, in fact). And, as you can see from the new cover, I've been mining it for all it's worth!
So much so that, I've recently teamed up with a Greek coder, and we're in the process of making it into a free Flash game. So, hopefully in 2017, you'll be able to google the title and play an all-singing, all-dancing version of this.
Much Love,
Dom
PS Yes, I did play Zork on my dad's Spectrum. Didn't get anywhere with it myself...
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