Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

This Android app collects all 20 volumes of Joe Dever's classic gamebook RPG series into one fantastic game.

The series was always leaps and bounds ahead of its nearest competitor (the Fighting Fantasy series) by virtue of telling one continuous story. Your character, "Lone Wolf", is a Kai Lord: a cross between a Shaolin monk, a ninja, and a Tolkienesque ranger: Book 1 is largely spent running away from the bad guys, but you gain new skills and abilities with each book, and by Book 20 you are trading blows with demi-gods. The world of Magnamund is really well thought out, a step removed from the generic D&D lands of the mid-80s, and the writing is definitely more evocative than the norm.

This Android version is nigh-on perfect: all the finicky dice-rolling, stat-keeping and inventory-managing is done for you, it plays just as well as the paid gamebooks from Tinman, Inkle, Cubus etc, but is nevertheless completely free. You can pay for optional extra bookmarks, but don't need to as if you get killed you are only sent back to the beginning of that book. If you're an Android user, install this immediately!

A very simple choice-based comedy skit: thou must saveth thy princess from thee dragon. Naturally, things don't go to plan. Plays in a browser window and is over in a flash. Very linear, but guaranteed to raise a smile.

The current eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii has led to lots of speculation that the goddess Pele is back and she's angry. But this game has taught me there is another form of Pele's Curse: if you take any local rocks away with you as souvenirs, bad luck will befall you. This scares the thieving tourists enough that many send the rocks back in the post: as a Hawaii tourist board employee, you need to drive around putting them back in their rightful places.

This is very much a postcard from Hawaii, both in size and style: an excuse to implement a "what I did on my summer vacation" as a text adventure. Not that there's anything wrong with that. "Bolivia By Night" is another really good example of that kind of thing. There is not much to do, puzzles aren't really difficult, and it's short, but well-written throughout.