Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

It seems that the original creators of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are now beginning to take a back seat and allowing other authors to contribute ideas to the genre. This is not the first one where this has happened though as the American Steve Jackson had already written a gamebook, but now we are beginning to see other authors become involved and we are also beginning to see a movement away from the fantasy setting that the previous books have used. I have noticed though that when they do create a fantasy book they will use the world that Ian Livingstone (and to an extent Steve Jackson) has developed.

This book is somewhat different though as it is set on the world of Orb and you are actually not a native of Orb but rather of Earth. You are taken from Earth by the gods of Orb to assist in a very big problem that they are facing. You are given skills in swordsmanship and are then dumped in the middle of a dungeon where you encounter a doomed party of adventurers attempting to escape a rampaging horde with an artifact known as the Talisman of Death. They give the Talisman to you, tell you that you have to keep it out of the hands of the bad people, however what you are told to do with it is at this stage still to be found out.

I did not attempt to go through all of the paths in this book, and when you get to the city it becomes a little tricky. It seems that despite the authors telling you that there is only one true path there are actually a few paths that you can take. It also seems that most of the book is set within a city, however you first travel to this city and once you have done all that you need to do (which includes losing the Talisman and then regaining it after a very hard battle with a powerful priestess) you then escape from the city (with some nasty assassins on your tail) to travel to a mountain where you take the Talisman back to Earth.

This book was okay, but it seems that by the time we get to this book the original nature of the game books seems to be drying out. I remember that the earlier books I read multiple times, however, even though I had had this book for quite a while this was really the first time I actually read it through and completed it. I am not going to mark this book down as a part of my reading challenge though simply because first of all I did not give myself a big enough challenge, and also I technically do not count this as a book per se but rather as a game (which is a book).