Item - Secret of the Royal Treasure

I thought this book was pretty well-written, although at time a little too aimed at the kids. There were also some pretty good time machine mechanics story-wise. Loops almost always move you forward, so it's easy to reach the end, but the book also rewards re-reading more than the average book in this series. There is one choice that leads you way forward, skipping much of the last half of the book! There's also one weird moment where you change history a little. You can see my map of the book here.

More reviews by DavidSky

This is Carol Gaskin's first entry in this series (and her first gamebook to follow the Forgotten Forest books). It shows the same love of rhyme and wordplay displayed in some of those books, though the context of Elizabethan England makes these tendencies feel considerably less jarring. The book is also notable since it rather unambiguously suggests that the reader's character's gender is male (though at one point you can successfully impersonate the voice of a female ghost). This lack of gender neutrality is particularly interesting considering the book's female author. On a whole, the book isn't exceptional, but it is good, and its final revelations are definitely satisfying and, to a degree, thought-provoking; Queen Elizabeth's life certainly wasn't simple....

More reviews by Demian

[Rating: 1/10]
[Recommended? NO]

While the promising potential of the premise in the Time Machine adventure "Secret of the Royal Treasure" is at least partially well-handled, there were particularly few redeeming components to save the quest from its prominent, pitiful weaknesses. It's unfortunate how the dangers are kept at arm's length even though the era's appealing visual-oriented choice-based design system fares well as far as reader immersiveness goes. The writing drifts from uninspired and clunky to very much aware of the narrative's potential, but - as with the majority of the books in the series - I think the adventure would've been more enjoyable had it avoided limiting itself to a single correct path; the inventory selection at the start is a bit arbitrary, I might add, and less seamlessly woven into the story compared to the databank, use of setting and handling of "characters". While the year it take place in may be 1599 AD, you won't find too many pointers suggesting a whole lot of imagination was put into the writing of this quest apart from what had commonly been covered in existing documents/research books or documentaries at the time this was written; though the research isn't exactly dated, per se, retrospectively there are parts scattered about here and there which feel a bit incomplete.

These books, which in all truth are merely self-indulgent and hard-to-find excursions into a different point in time, appear hyper-focused on their short-lived novelty value - a real shame, since the design and the execution of the linear quest itself isn't all that great to begin with. With the exception of collectors of the series or the most ardent of pseudo-history buffs, I'm afraid I can't recommend this title or any of its time-traveling trepidations. ^^

(Mysteriously disappears into the shadows.)

More reviews by Shadeheart