Item - Could You Be a Deer?

(Review based on the Spanish translation.)

I enjoyed this first entry less than other books in the series. The book takes much less advantage of the visual format to enhance gameplay, and in many situations the correct decision you need to make in order to stay alive is quite obvious. It's still a decent gamebook, but not much more than that. It earns points for having a combat sequence (which is not something I've found too often in this series so far) and for openly mentioning animal mating, which is something an American gamebook would usually just gloss over. Since it'll probably be a while before I get to review another book in this series, I would also like to mention that I would have preferred to see more variety in settings (all or almost all the books deal with forest animals that live in the UK), though I suppose that would have made the series much more expensive to produce.

My high score: 136

More reviews by Guillermo

[Rating: 2/10]
[Recommended? NO]

The Survival gamebooks, for all their variety, follow the same format and aim to do precisely the same thing: invoke in younger readers the beginning steps of logic-based decising-making skills from the perspective of a wild animal (in this case, a deer). There's a delightfully educational approach that is at once encouraging and objective, and a uniquely semi-expansive photographic format that makes for an unusually immersive experience for children (at least superficially) - pages themselves consist of little text at times, though, instead offering a pictorical "go to this place by turning to that page". However, I found the writing to be rather uninspired, the book easy to sweep through in no time at all, the scoring system to be somewhat unremarkable, and the book itself to be a little more depressing than necessary. This is a book that had great intentions and brilliant potential - but the concept doesn't really translate into a replayable classic or even a book with much lasting literary worth once younger readers have gone through the survival game once. Again, it's a good idea with mismatched execution - and a tough book to recommend to most readers as well. ^^

(Mysteriously disappears into the shadows.)

More reviews by Shadeheart