Item - Return to Terror Tower

This is considerably more simplistic than the previous book. We're back to the usual numbered pages rather than numbered sections, and there's no use of dice; the only game mechanic retained is the inventory management, and it isn't exactly ground-breaking. The game design doesn't seem bad at first, allowing you to explore a number of medieval locations in a non-linear fashion, but its flaws show through rather quickly. The worst is a nasty continuity problem -- if you go to the forest, you have an important encounter. If you then go to the village, it's entirely possible that you'll end up having that very same encounter again due to the way the paths converge. Very sloppy! Other problems include the fact that there's little strategy involved in play (death often comes seemingly at random) and the incredible stupidity of the player character -- when you come across a bunch of signs which match the illustrations on your map, you're still supposedly puzzled about what they could mean... And when you follow the path leading to one tower, you believe for some reason that it leads to the other one! Perhaps the author intended for the book's drawings to be less obvious than what the illustrator ultimately created, but as it stands, it's kind of annoying. This book should have been much better, and it's a shame that the series lost its complexity after only one relatively interesting book was published.

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