Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Face the Demon-Lord Myurr Himself!, 15 Sep 2005
You are the Demon-Stalker, a person whos whole life has been dedicated to destroying demons as they try to enter your world. But now something is wrong! Demons are flooding into your world, by the hundreds led by a Demon Prince himself. And only you can stop him. With your Demon-stalking abilities and one of the few fighting fantasy books with MORE THAN ONE ENDING. Dead of night is a true challenge for and Fan, who is prepared to go face to face with a Demon-Lord
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Segmentary demonic horror-fantasy, 20 Oct 2007
This is one of the better of the original Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. As with all the series, the book is a second-person multiple choice adventure in which the reader takes on the role of the main protagonist and has to fight monsters, solve puzzles and make successful dice rolls to solve the adventure. The player-character has a considerable back-story, being a specialist demon-hunting Templar seeking to rescue his parents. In genre terms, the book is set firmly within the usual Fighting Fantasy world of Titan, but is basically a fantasy-horror title. Nearly all the villains, adversaries and situations involve demons or undead, though with few exceptions, they are more atmospheric than disturbing or frightening. It is mostly a trek through populated country besieged by enemies, reminiscent of the Lone Wolf series but with more horror overtones.
As a game, this gamebook is of a reasonable level of difficulty, can be completed by a character with fairly low statistics, and is challenging and multilinear enough to be highly replayable. As well as the standard FF mechanics of skill, stamina, luck, provisions and gold pieces, the player has to keep track of an "evil" score, which starts at zero and rises with callous actions and the use of certain skills, and must choose three from a list of seven demon-hunting skills, ranging from healing and meditation to protection and invisibility spells. (While one of these skills is highly advantageous, none of them are necessary for completion, but all have uses and give advantages such as allowing one to avoid certain risks or combats). The book is structured around a series of different segments set in different locations (the villages on the map at the front of the book), which can be visited in various orders or not at all depending on the route taken; each village, and some of the paths, involve a self-contained mini-scenario which must be solved/beaten either to avoid death, gain advantages or clues for later, or avoid amassing "evil points".
The variety of routes, combined with the choice of skills, leads to considerable variety and substantial replayability. There are a number of paths to victory - missing a clue or item is not usually fatal if the player has high skill or luck scores or makes good/lucky choices - and since finding certain items (such as the demon-slayer sword) is not essential to success, there is still plenty to explore even after the first victory. There are a couple of structural weaknesses, the first being that the author failed to close a loophole which allows repeated visits to locations one has already dealt with, the second being that the character follows a path northward regardless of whether or not the reader has found out where the target location is. Also, though the route taken can be one of several, the beginning and end sections are always the same. One frustrating aspect is that the final section in Myurr's fortress consists of quite a long bottleneck of linear-connected sections, many of which contain risks of instant death (at least four separate choices of this kind exist, none of them patently irrational or bad), so it is quite common to successfully reach the tower only to be suddenly killed.
As a book, the scenario is passable but simplistic. There is an overall story of an attempt by the demon prince Myurr to come to the earthly plane by means of sorcery, in which Myurr has captured the hero's parents who must be rescued and the summoning stopped. Most of the story, however, consists of a discontinuous series of encounters in each location, some of which yield useful outcomes, others being mainly perils. Although structurally distinct, the different segments nevertheless retain the coherence of a single atmosphere and area, and are interrelated - for instance, one will later encounter damage caused by the demon army one may have encountered earlier. In fact, given the structure, the book hangs together surprisingly well. Still, it does not have an overall narrative, even on the optimal course, and consists rather of a series of mini-scenarios. For example, as the player-character you might be found trying to keep yourself and the villagers alive for the night while under assault from Moon Demons; defending a farmhouse from skeletons; killing an evil necromancer; destroying a Land Blight, an organic fortress fuelled by human lives, by closing its maw and destroying the gem at its centre; preventing a demonic resurrection; dealing with a plague-town; reaching and destroying a massive searchlight-like eye (obviously modelled on Sauron from Lord of the Rings, but far less powerful); trying to survive a poisoning and corpse-robbery plot, and so on.
Game mechanics aside, the book also does not stand out for its originality. The villains are quite predictable and one-dimensional, there are no real plot twists, few variants from the standard list of fantasy creatures, and the book seems much more generic and stereotypical than, for instance, Legend of the Shadow Warriors, Phantoms of Fear or Beneath Nightmare Castle (not to mention Castle Death or The Coils of Hate). So while very playable, I didn't find it especially engaging.
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by Steve Jackson
by Paul Mason
by Steve Jackson
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