S. Eric Meretzky

When I was a youngster, gamebooks were the bee’s knees. I suppose one of the very, very few advantages I had being a little Brit boy moving over to America at a young age was that I was able to bring some Fighting Fantasy books from England along with me AND I was able to devour a number of the Choose Your Own Adventure series published in the US. The best of both worlds, so to speak. Later, I discovered the gamebooks based on D&D, Hero Quest, the incredible Freeway Warrior series, and many more. I loved these books, because you could finish one in a single sitting, they were usually re-readable, because they were ‘re-playable’, and they challenged you to think, to use logic and wit to solve the problems and puzzles. Yeah, sometimes the decisions were incredibly easy, complete no-brainers… but sometimes they were just brutal, and woe to the poor saps who would get caught out in the cheater’s traps the gamebooks cunningly threw in there.

Then there were these Zork books, based upon the popular computer series of the same name. At a scant 160 pages or so, the first book in the series, The Forces of Krill, introduced me to the wonderful world of Zork. Never mind the fact that I would later suck at Zork when I snagged a copy for my PC (put me in front of a game of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or Leather Goddesses of Phobos though and I’ll get you the max score, I tell ya), the books were a fine substitute for the game and still managed to bring the land of grues and axe-wielding trolls to life in vivid blood-and-damnation style.

The Forces of Krill puts the young or young-at-heart reader into the shoes of a couple of school kids, Bill and June, who become known as Bivotar and Juranda once they are magically transported into the Land of Frobozz. With the aid of a magical sword the duo happen upon, Biv and Juran are charged with a quest to find three missing artifacts, the Palantirs, which will aid the warrior-wizard Syovar in the ongoing battle against the serpentine army of the evil sorcerer Krill. Dude, I am so there. This setup still gets me excited some seventeen years after first reading it. I don’t care how geeky it makes me sound.

The puzzles in this one are incredibly simple, and the whole adventure can be completed in no time at all, but there’s more than one path you can take, and going through just to get the failed endings is almost more fun than getting the proper ending. Of course, I’m the kind of person who plays a game like Dragon’s Lair just to see all the fun and gruesome death scenes, so naturally I would find enjoyment in this sort of thing. Most of the time, the book gives you a second chance anyway, but there are a few notable exceptions. Brilliantly, there’s at least one puzzle where you need to look at one of the illustrations in order to pick up on a vital clue. And like the computer game, the book keeps ’score’ for you, which may seem a tad superfluous, but certainly adds to the Zork atmosphere.

If my final score was based on nostalgia alone, I would award full marks. While there’s nothing wrong with the writing, as a gamebook The Forces of Krill is just too darn easy, even for a youngster. Maybe it was just a soft introduction to the book series, or maybe it really was intended for idiots like me who consistently performed epic fails on the computer version...… (more)