Item - Beyond the Nightmare Gate

This is a great book; it lives up to the quality of writing found in the previous volume, and it's full of interesting settings and puzzles. I also found the story more compelling than usual for this kind of gamebook -- while it's still the usual "solve the puzzles and collect stuff" sort of mission, it has a number of dramatic moments strong enough to create an almost cinematic tone at times. Good stuff! The game design is also interesting -- the emphasis is on making wise choices rather than on making good rolls; during my trip through the book, my point scores barely fluctuated, though I did instantly die quite a few times before becoming victorious. On a whole, I think this is a good thing; it's certainly less frustrating than book one was. Nonetheless, it did seem a bit too forgiving towards the end. I'm not sure how anyone's scores could possibly go low enough to fail certain conditions presented by the book. I also have a few other minor complaints. Most importantly, I was rather disappointed that no character advancement takes place at the start of this book for players who have finished the first two adventures. While I admit that it wouldn't make much sense in the context of the story, I missed the satisfaction of being rewarded for completing book two. There's also a bit of rules ambiguity -- the book keeps saying that keys are special items kept in the backpack. I'm not sure what this means, but my best guess is that they are kept in your backpack but don't take up a slot of space, so they're instead put on the special items list... If this is the case, though, it should have been stated more clearly. Additionally, there's a minor bug towards the beginning in which you can keep returning to a locked door (section 118) even after opening it. Finally, I thought the "Story So Far" section at the start of this volume was decidedly lousy. Not only is it written in a different tense than in previous books, but it's too brief to be particularly meaningful. Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with this adventure, and I'm glad to be returning to this series.

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