Item - King's Quest

This is a pretty good book. There are a lot of paths through it, the writing is fairly good and many of the encounters are interesting. The biggest flaw is that some of the battles in the book are won a bit too easily (at least when you take into consideration how hard they'd be in an actual roleplaying session), but this problem shows up in many of the books in this series and is almost unavoidable without a combat system.

More reviews by Demian

(Review based on the Spanish translation.)

Not to be confused with a very popular computer game released the same year (which, oddly, also mostly involves trudging along in the wilderness), this is quite a good book. Like many other books in this series, your player character is a mostly helpless pre-teen, but it is possible to recruit the help of either a competent warrior or a powerful wizard to accompany you on the mission (it is also possible to undertake and complete the adventure without the help of either). The inclusion of capable companion characters gives the player the feel of playing an actual D&D game session (not unlike Pillars of Pentegarn by Rose Estes). It also doesn't hurt that the book is both quite entertaining and faithful to the D&D mythos. Setting the adventure in the wilderness is a plus given that the Endless Quest series contains a few too many dungeon-crawls. Gameplay can be quite involving since choices are more challenging than is usual in this series, and the book never gets boring after repeated plays. Overall, this is a very enjoyable adventure.

More reviews by Guillermo

A competent entry. You play a young orphan juggler who travels with your older brother from village to village. You come across a dying knight on a quest to find and bury the bones of his ancestor, a king, and you take up his quest. There's also the promise of treasure.

Like other books where you portray a young character, the choices here depend on you using your wits rather than fighting. There are a number of different paths, so lots of replay value. A set of bandits pursue you, giving you scary antagonists.

One of the optimal endings features a wizards' duel in which the mages transform into a number of beasts. It showcases an almost paper, scissors, rock competition between D&D monsters. Blue dragon gets beat by black pudding which gets beat by red dragon which gets beat by a stone golem which gets beat by an umber hulk, which gets beat by..., etc. As a kid I loved this attention to monster detail.

More reviews by Kveto