Doug Bolden's Reviews > Forest of Doom

This one is a bit unique for me in that my initial run was very near a perfect guess to an optimal ending and then with a slight tweak managed to beat the book in something like half an hour. While that means that subsequent run-throughs to learn more about it and to see all the possible paths had some of the stress taken off, it also kind of felt too much like fluff. This is not really the book's fault, just a potential outcome of playing so many of these that you end getting a sense of what each author is really trying at.

What is the book's fault is that the One True Path (the Fighting Fantasy and Livingstone staple) is one of the most boring in the series: buy the right three or four items, get in a couple of fights (both relatively doable even at lower stats), avoid nearly everything but a couple of luck rolls. The Champskees' analysis puts it at 86% likely to succeed even with minimal stats (note, that link also has the walkthrough so only click if you don't mind possibly spoiling it for yourself). I've complained before shopping lists in these books — where it is impossible to know which items you need until after you play the books and once you accept that knowledge is playable then other clues and hints also seem on the table which alters some paths — and this one flags a bit in some of the path descriptions with several junctions being essentially "you see trees, east or west?" However...

The more I played this book the more I appreciated the mechanics behind it. If you think of this as a book to solve, then it gets maybe a bit too easy. If you treat it as a book to explore, both in the sense of the world and learning more about Fighting Fantasy mechanics, then it is quite solid. There is the fact that some of the encounters reference others — a boar running from a pack of dogs is referenced later when you meet the huntsman, a silver dart in a bear is referenced in a different encounter, and so forth — so there are these bits of micro-lore sprinkled in. Livingstone might have went a bit overboard with the density of disjointed encounters here but he was building a sense of inherent logic that I appreciate. At least some of the encounters are very well done and great sparks for the imagination, as well: the sassy gnome and the weird fungal clones come to mind, or maybe the way that a couple of the rougher fights can be cleverly avoided once you know how.

The general shape is something of a grid with a handful of encounters (or mini-dungeon) at various intersections and half-way marks. This means each path through the forest will have something to do and depending on some direction choices (especially swinging back and forth on the east/west axis) you can work quite a bit of adventure while working out the aforementioned boring optimal path. While this mechanic of a grid-based point-crawl becomes really obvious as you start mapping it out, it also means that folks can plot out it and map without having to use some of the fuzzy directions that other books in the series can require.

And that large shopping list at the beginning where only a couple of the items are needed to beat the game? Effectively every item has some place so even if you win it can be worth a mini-game of trying to map out where you might use the other ones.

Combine this with the addition of a "loop back to the beginning" option at the end if you did not solve the puzzle and you have a book that in principle is an excellent learn-to-play-Fighting Fantasy option. Slightly flawed in that a few of the fights have optional mechanics and others are not really described in detail, so it is one of those book easier to adjudicate if you already know Fighting Fantasy. This book needs a bit of a remake, I feel, to shore it up — and maybe allow people to criss-cross back over explored nodes rather than have to loop the whole book.

Not exactly my cup of tea with the encounter randomness and overall too low of a difficulty — a sentence I will regret more and more as I go forward in the series, I bet — but there is much here to love. 3.5 stars.