Item - Marked for Death

The first gamebook series I played the whole way through was The World of Lone Wolf, and in many ways, it remains unsurpassed in my affections (though the main Lone Wolf series comes close). Thus, when The Huntress was released, seemingly out of nowhere and all at once, I was quite excited to explore a new self-contained series set in Magnamund... though also nervous that the books could not possibly live up to my expectations and nostalgia. I'm happy to report, however, that Marked for Death brings the series to a very promising start and managed to exceed my somewhat tempered expectations.

From the very beginning, with character creation and rules, the book demonstrates a deep understanding of what makes Lone Wolf work, but also a willingness to innovate and modernize. On the one hand, what we see here is very familiar: a list of skills, abilities and equipment to choose from; the Random Number Table and Combat Results Table; a character sheet with limited space for weapons, backpack items and coins. On the other hand, some things have changed in significant ways: the skill list is all new and quite diverse; some annoying random elements (like picking random numbers for Combat Skill and Endurance) have been done away with. There are many interesting choices to consider, but you'll never wish to throw away a play-through just because you started with bad stats.

Once the paragraphs of the adventure itself are reached, the Lone Wolf feeling is immediately apparent: the font and layout match the classics (though the text is perhaps a bit larger than usual thanks to the luxurious hardcover format); Gary Ward's slightly abstract and eccentric art is distinct from that of Gary Chalk and Brian Williams but feels like it belongs to the same family; the many references to the people and places of Magnamund successfully impart the flavor of the adventure's world without getting in the way of the adventure at hand. The biggest break with tradition is the comparatively short length of only 250 sections, but with three books dropping all at once, it's hard to complain too much about the slightly shorter length of each individual title.

The story here is not especially deep, but it doesn't need to be: you're on a fetch quest, and you have to survive many dangers along the way; the deeper mystery of The Huntress' identity helps to motivate the action, and that aspect of the story will presumably be explored in greater detail in subsequent volumes. In this book, the lack of a complex plot is more than compensated for by a variety of environments to explore, some exciting action set-pieces, a few memorably gruesome foes to fight, and several well-drawn characters to interact with.

From a gameplay perspective, this again feels like classic Lone Wolf, slightly modernized. The overall design is not a frustrating "find the one true path" exercise, but rather a fairly flexible network of pathways that lead in the same general direction but offer a significant variety of alternate courses, enabling you to find the combination of choices that best suits your character and gameplay style, and allowing quite a bit of experimentation when replaying after failure. Inventory management plays an important role, with the story offering you a large number of interesting items to choose from -- more than your backpack can possibly hold -- and forcing you to choose carefully and anticipate future needs. Combat uses the classic Lone Wolf system -- still my favorite of any gamebook series -- but with many fights adding variety through interesting special rules and wrinkles, and some sprawling across multiple sections based on your rolls and choices.

During my play of the book, I did have a bit of trouble getting through one unavoidable fight that marks a significant turning point in the adventure; I lost that battle enough times to feel that I had explored most of the possible permutations of the early part of the adventure, and those early paragraphs began to wear out their welcome once I had found what seemed like the optimal path for my preferred character build but still kept failing due to various unlucky rolls. This may be as much due to poor strategy on my part as to a flaw in the design, but either way, it was the only point in which my enthusiasm waned, and that was not for long. Once past that bottleneck, it only took three or four more attempts to reach the end of the adventure, and there was satisfying variety to explore during each of those final playthroughs. I'm also sure the book still holds some secrets for me to discover on future replays....

In any case, with my first quest completed, I'm now quite eager to grow my character and see what lies in store next!

More reviews by Demian