Item - Die Ruine des Unheils

This is a rather simply structured gamebook directed at younger readers, but has some fun ideas and story twists on its way.

You are a young unicorn shepherd, who lost his family and home in a sudden attack by non-human baddies, gets sent on an errand to warn authorities of a national crisis, and has to single-handedly vanquish the big bad wizard in the end. Sounds familiar.

The author obviously gets his inspiration from Fighting Fantasy, as the skill and combat systems are very similar. But it breaks linearity sometimes by giving the player opportunities to explore places (as on maps) while limiting choices ("you only have time to visit 3 places this afternoon"). It creates an impression of free-roam freedom and adds some nice little side quests, some of them ending the adventure rather abruptly. Abrupt is also the apt description for the ending - there's almost no denouement or closure or completion of backstory, you're simply done, hooray.

There are some other quirks, as in language: The reader is addressed formally in the introduction, as if talking to an unfamiliar stranger, and as soon as the story starts, we're on an informal colloquial level. The book also does not seem to trust its combat system, as you very soon get a non-lethal one-shot weapon. Nobody seems to die anyway. The monsters have made-up cutesy names, the spiritual-guide-king's magician that you meet in dreams is more sinister than the villain, the villain's hideout is populated by very peculiar characters and a second villain is completely forgotten on the way.

All in all, enjoyable, quirky, sometimes funny, and with some choices based on reason and morals, quite easy to solve..... if it didn't suffer from critical errors. I bought this book ca. 1985 and never completed it, the story starts to loop in one place and section references are completely wrong in another. I solved it just now, due to the errata section in this website, and would like to thank Demian and the contributors for that with this review.

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