Item - Quelling of the Flame

The second book in The Huntress series maintains the high quality standard set by the previous volume. As before, the hallmarks of Lone Wolf gameplay are present: there are lots of interesting, challenging and meaningful choices that can change the shape of your journey and the development of your character, yet there is also a story whose forward momentum cannot be held back. Also as in the previous volume, while there are plenty of familiar mechanics, there are also some modernizations and innovations that give it a certain freshness and take advantage of game design lessons learned in the decades since the original series was published.

The book starts out a little slowly, with a lengthy travelogue during which the only branch points are related to equipment and skills gained (or overlooked) in the previous volume. While this highlights the possible benefits of replaying the first book to find different paths, it also means there's quite a lot of text to read before the real gameplay gets underway. Fortunately, the book progressively opens up after this point. First, there is a city exploration section which can build upon events from the first book in several different ways, and which offers multiple opportunities to build up your character and inventory. This is followed by an action sequence which can take a variety of shapes, and which sets up the final portion of the book: an open-ended but time-limited exploration of a fairly large region.

The book's final exploration portion is the most mechanically interesting part of the book; there is a lot going on here. You have considerable freedom of movement, you can establish more than one possible base of operations, and different things can happen at different locations depending on when you reach them. Since you are under time constraints, you can't possibly see everything in a single play-through. Normally, this time limit would not be to my taste -- I couldn't help being reminded of Scorpion Swamp, one of my favorite Fighting Fantasy books because of its non-linear exploration and mapping, but that time limit gets in the way of systematic exploration here. However, in this instance, I absolutely cannot complain: the genuine urgency of the story kept me desperately pressing forward where a less well-written book would have left me more interested in drawing a map.

And that's where the book's real triumph comes in: its story has real stakes, and there are some very consequential decisions to make. There's a strong chance that your eventual victory will come at a considerable cost. But, unlike some memorable earlier books (I'm looking at you, Grey Star the Wizard), not every tragedy is inevitable. I've rarely felt much motivation to immediately return to a gamebook after reaching the victory section, but this book is a notable exception. I'm moving forward for now to see how the series ends, but I'm already eager to try again from the beginning and see how differently some things might play out. That replay potential is part of the promise of gamebooks in general, but it's a promise rarely fulfilled this successfully.

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