Item - Cages of Fear

This review will be largely be a comparison between Cages of Fear and two earlier titles with similar design philosophy. The first will be the obvious Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which is the archetypal adventure gamebook. The second is Escape the Dark Castle, which is a board game, but inspired by Warlock. Both of these games are titles I greatly enjoy, and I find them both significantly superior to Cages of Fear.

Cages of Fear is a very barebones (no pun intended) dungeon crawl system. You wake up in some sort of prison cell. Some mysterious guy gives you some items and instructs you on how to pick your class and play the game. Then you just start flipping through the pages and rolling dice. If you get to the end, you escape. The game mechanics are extremely simple: You have a base starting health, damage, and intellect. You can collect experience (to improve stats), gold (to buy shit), potions (to heal), lock picks (to open chests), and spells (deal damage). Almost everything is determined by rolling either one or two d6s: How many pages forward you move, whether you or an enemy deal damage to the other, whether you avoid or are hit by a trap, whether a chest is trapped or full of treasure. Other things, like some minor skills and equipment usage, are determined by class.

For most of the game, though, you'll just be rolling dice to figure out what dice to roll next. There is almost no dice mitigation, and all you can do when things aren't going your way is decide whether to flee, heal with potions, or blast your enemy with a spell, all of which you have limited quantities or chance of success. It is quite possible to lose the game on the second monster having made zero decisions in total. The monsters will get successively stronger the farther you go into the book, and eventually the loot will be outweighed by the amount of health or items you'll lose fighting those monsters. Then eventually you die, because the game is designed for you to lose most of the time.

Having covered most of the book's format, I'll now compare it to Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The story of this book is, indeed, also quite thin: You head into a mountain guarded by a fearsome warlock, and it's a dungeon crawl. Some of the design philosophy is quite similar: You don't really see all that far ahead when making your decisions. The combat is mostly dice and luck-based with minimal mitigation. The art is black and white in a plain but dark fantasy style. New players can expect to lose multiple times before finding the one true path, for which there are no hints.

However, the subtle differences are enough to make Warlock a far superior product. For one, Warlock carries a strong sense of setting. You are not in "a dungeon," you are delving into a warlock's lair, and the layout of that lair can be mapped out because it is a "real" place with consistent internal logic. In the second half, you must wander through a maze to find the warlock's chambers, and your sense of direction is quite important in this endeavor. On the other hand, Cages of Fear just has you roll dice to see how far into the dungeon you go, and whatever happens to you happens.

Similarly, the combat seems quite "unfair." Though both game systems involve simply rolling dice, Cages maintains a relatively strict symmetry: Unless you're using a spell to deal instant damage, whoever rolls higher deals damage. This is unlike Fighting Fantasy, where you as the hero are a true HERO who is more skillful than all but a few monsters in the dungeon you delve into; your enemies might make up for it in numbers or unique abilities, but you have hopefully accumulated your own magic or equipment to fight or outwit your enemy. But in Cages of Fear, it's entirely possible (and over the course of a play through, probable) that you will have your shit wrecked by a random skeleton whereas you were delivering a flawless victory on a bone golem... just because you rolled worse this time. In fact, Cages of Fear's dice comparison feature is nothing but a dressed up coin toss with a 1 in 6 chance of a tie (which you simply re-roll). The traps largely amount to naught but the same thing, with increasingly punishing penalties for "failing" to avoid them. Additionally, the inventory and stats also seem to amount to nothing more than their mechanics. At various points in time, you will find an Ivory Amulet or an Obsidian Amulet, but there is no further description beyond (+1 intellect)/(+3 intellect). Every item function is already written there in the character sheet, and the item names almost don't matter at all. In Warlock, you may find a magical shield that will allow you to reduce damage that you receive at certain times. Many times you'll find items which seem useful but do nothing, items which seem useless but are somehow useful, and other very conditional items which tie the whole story universe together.

Also note that Warlock of Firetop Mountain is not, in the modern sense, anywhere close to the best gamebook even in the Fighting Fantasy line, much less in the total gamebook ecosystem. Books like Stormslayer take the Fighting Fantasy system and blow up it to epic proportions with dramatic and heroic plot lines and unique settings which go beyond the basic Tolkienesque tropes. Other gamebooks like DestinyQuest contain more complete RPG and combat mechanics, whereas Graphic Novel Adventures gives more reader-involved storylines while dispensing of combat altogether. Cages of Fear is merely the simplest of all dungeon crawl gamebooks, and a stylistic opposite of Choose Your Own Adventure, a story-focused gamebook series whose internal logic is equally nonsensical.

And yet, I have to mention Escape the Dark Castle, a 1-4 player board game which draws elements from the D&D and Fighting Fantasy traditions, and yet—like Cages of Fear— maintains a "shit happens to you" storyline and mostly dice-throw based combat system with arguably an even smaller decision space than Cages of Fear. Just like in Cages of Fear, Escape the Dark Castle has you wake up in a castle prison cell and make your escape, experiencing and battling horrors, traps, and monsters thrown before you, which were predetermined by a deck of randomly shuffled cards. The base game contains generally no coherent storyline, and the equipment you draw is random from a deck with no specific interactions with specific encounters. The decision space in Escape the Dark Castle is: 1. Take risks or don't 2. Have someone rest or throw everyone into combat. And combat is resolved by matching skills rolled on thrown character dice to skills required by monster dice to defeat those monsters. In principle, the mechanics and theme are not so different from those of Cages of Fear. So why is Escape the Dark Castle so much better? It probably comes down to the pacing and the stakes. In Cages of Fear, you pretty much know where you stand most of the time. You will encounter either a monster, a trap, a chest, a merchant, or some combination of those. You have X many health potions and Y many spells to hurl at your enemies. You slowly see your resources dwindling, and whether you'll make it to the end is a dressed-up probability math question. Escape the Dark Castle dresses it up much better.

In Escape the Dark Castle, anything could happen. Difficulty doesn't scale up progressively; you are thrown into the deep end of the pool, and pretty soon you are near drowning. You will always live and die by the skin of your teeth, and the items you scrounge up seem hopelessly weak, and yet you will live or die by them. This gives Escape an extremely oppressive atmosphere, with huge heft. There are fewer encounters, but if each one is not equally important, they are all at least given equal weight. The illustrations are shadowy and grotesque. The flavor text is as detailed as it can be in a card. The immersion blends the theme and mechanics together. On the other hand, Cages of Fear just runs you into enemy after enemy, trap after trap. Each one has some bland flavor text, and while the illustrations are adequate, they are all drawn with extremely thin and light lines with few shadows, giving a sketchy feel. It's all washed out and bleached. And you just go through it at a blistering pace which leaves very little impression on you when all is said and done.

This is not to say this book is meritless. If you want "a dungeon crawl" which you can pick up and set down at any time with no maintenance or, indeed, anything but a pencil and eraser (random dice rolls are etched into different pages for you to flip through), this book may do the trick. You do not have to get invested in some fantastical storyline or series spanning multiple volumes, and you don't need to carry around a box with cards and components. I just don't see the simplifications as anything worth getting rather than an already quite simple Warlock of Firetop Mountain or similar gamebook.

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