Item - You're Plant Food

This is quite an interesting little book. Like most of the volumes in the series, it contains two more or less unrelated adventures, and it has lots of inconsistencies of storyline. Nonetheless, its game design is remarkably sophisticated for such a simple book. As in Shop Till You Drop...Dead!, one of the storylines included here is extremely non-linear and requires the player to figure out the best order for the actions to be carried out in. Inventory management is also essential in order for the book's mission to be successfully completed. The other storyline is more straightforward, but it still has the twist that if you fail to perform a particular action early on, you can't succeed at the end. This is definitely about as close to a "real" gamebook that you're going to get in this series, and it's a fairly entertaining read.

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I highly enjoyed this title. I've always been a fan of the "choose your own order" scenarios because I believe it empowers the reader even more by giving them a stronger sense of control in such situations where the order may prove to be imperative in terms of actually "beating" the book. With this title, we have just that and it is done rather well. I do, however, have a slight problem with the abruptness of the ending that follows after all of the areas are explored. It seems that after successfully investigating each subsequent room, the reader is able to essentially "ride off into the sunset." What I mean by this is that there does not seem to be a sense of a "final boss" or "final challenge" that I thought would be awaiting me after I had successfully completed each destination. This could, of course, be because of my own expectations, but aside from that this book made for an entertaining read.

More reviews by Enigmatic Synergy