Forest Of Doom: A PC port of a tablet game adaptation of an old game-book. I'm not familiar with this one but I did use to have several of the series. My favourite was Legend of Zagor. Had the novel series for that one too! At one point I loaned the game-book to my cousin who was interested in the concept. He never returned it and I ended up seeing it torn apart from his bunkbed foot. While it has been republished, I'd love to get one with the original cover again.

Anyway. These things were great when the only gaming devices I had was a C64 and Atari 2600, and with parents only allowing me 30-60 minutes a day on them. All I needed was a couple of dice which I usually borrowed from my parents poker/gaming sets.

In the digital age, there are no need for physical dice. So I ignored all the polyhedral ones on my shelf and run an executable instead.

The story here is very very simple. You play the nameless hero! Out camping in the wilderness, you encounter a dwarf on the verge of death who hands you a map to a mage's tower and pleads with you to save his village of Stonebridge.

There's a tiny amount of plot that follows, but the task is to pick up two pieces of a hammer and... Well, once combined the village is saved. Somehow. Don't worry too much about that, it has to do with fighting off trolls that you never encounter.

Blindly select a few inventory items and go on you way. East or West.

While a lot of the actual game books I remember as a kid were reasonably linear, Forest of Doom tries to add in some variety. You eventually end up at the same location, if you don't die, but the East or West option you start with will give a different set of encounters along the way.

It is possible to cross over to the over side of the map a few times along the way through the game, but you can never backtrack. Sure, the most optimal path to win once you know can be done in a few minutes, but exploring all these alternate paths is worth it for the achievements and being able to use the items you buy at the mage's tower near the start.

They are mostly useless. To be fair you only need 3 of them. But it is worth grabbing a few to try out in different situations.

I guess that's a bit of a problem. While it is possible for a person to win the game the very first time they play it without cheating and on while on Hardcore mode, it relies on a lot of luck of choosing the right items and paths.

You can also get totally screwed over by rolling a 1 when rolling for your skill (Attack) stat at the start of the game. It is possible to roll low on stamina (Health) and make it through, but a low skill score and the inability to reset a normal game means it may just be worth heading towards the hardest monster for a game over.

I'm not saying you have to roll a 6. But with a 1 and a 1 you may as well suicide as fast as you can before the RNG arrives to kick your chin to the curb.

Some monsters do have ways where you can avoid combat with them. But it is not every encounter. And even the weaker ones can easily kill you in a few hits if you are unlucky.

There is a luck stat, which slowly drains each time you use it. But I never really found it useful. Since you can retrace your steps easy enough, or use one of the few healing items if you really have to, but there's little point to it outside of RP'ing in your head for crits.

That all said. It does provide a free roam option. While you can't skip to any page like you could with the books, you can return to the previous page, unlock the options for items you don't have, and heal outside of combat for free. Essentially, Cheat-Mode.

And in an era of micro-transactions and files being locked down from editing, this is rather welcomed.

All in all, it is a pretty simple text adventure RPG that captures the old game books really well. You can change font size and style, to make it easer/denser to read but the reflow will you you at a different section of the paragraphs. Graphical Style can also be changed from old and new at any point, like the old black and white images from the books? They're available right there in the options!

With 31 achievements, it can take an hour or two to grind them all out. Thankfully these do require you to explore the branching forest paths to unlock. They're not the most exciting things but it will stop you from rushing through it all as many require you to move in certain steps.

I enjoyed this one, and I'm likely to try out a few of the other book adaptations too at a later date.

Game Acquisition: On Sale (Bundle Stars).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 2 - 7 October 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP SP3
Processor: 2 GHz dual core
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Hardware Accelerated Graphics with dedicated memory
Storage: 350 MB available space