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 DeviantArt.
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 (Oh My!) by Dominic O'Reilly 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)
No comments:
Post a Comment