Beneath Nightmare Castle - Part 1

I CURSE MYSELF FOR AN INATTENTIVE FOOL: as I've mentioned before, somehow without my noticing, gamebooks have changed from being a fond and fuzzy memory of my youth to a full-blown web phenomenon. Who would have thought? To be honest, before I discovered this, I would have been hard-pressed to think of an aspect of nostalgia less likely to recurr in this electronic age. After all, who wants to have to keep their own scores and roll their own dice in games anymore?

Lost Games: Devil's Flight by Gaetano Abbondanza

Devil’s Flight is my second-only entry into the reviewing genre of gamebook playthroughs, and the world (or at least the internet) has changed since those heady days of playing through Bodies on the Docks. Back then, I was aware of only one site doing playthroughs of those old Fighting Fantasy books, and that was the excellently-named Fighting Dantasy. Yeah, I wish I’d thought of that title (though my name isn’t Dan). Back then,as far as I knew there wasn’t much interest in gamebooks on the net, or anywhere else either. I pictured Dan as a tortured, lone genius, working tirelessly to keep the gamebook flame alight with no help from an uncaring world.

Storytrails by Allen Sharp

The Storytrails gamebooks are to Fighting Fantasy what a French arthouse film is to a dumb Hollywood blockbuster: by comparison, they’re weird, hard-to-find, and deeply unmarketable.

Let’s examine the differences here.