Gamebook Adventures: Fighting Fantasy

GAMEBOOK ADVENTURES: FIGHTING FANTASY

Tin Man Games

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Australia’s Tin Man Games had been producing classic-feeling Android and Windows gamebook apps for a few years when, in 2012, they began to use their own in-house Gamebook Adventures engine as the basis for a series of adaptations of books from the Fighting Fantasy series, beginning with the (then) newly-released 30^th Anniversary book Blood Of The Zombies. Subsequently, from January 2013 through to December 2014, they would release a further seven adaptations. Whilst the series’ focus was on certain Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson-penned efforts, Jonathan Green’s Bloodbones would also get the Tin Man app treatment.

Unusually for electronic versions of previously-published gamebooks, the text and design of the original source material was not altered in any way. Instead, these apps present the books (at least in terms of words and maps) exactly as per the original print editions (with one minor exception in Starship Traveller’s ending, but more on that later) which is a pleasing thing to see. Whilst modifications do sometimes return surprises and avoid being slavish renditions of familiar territory, it is nice to be able to play electronic gamebooks that are 100% faithful to the originals as it does allow the material to speak for itself. Naturally, this can mean that the original brilliance or mediocrity of a given book cannot be masked and it has to be said that Tin Man’s choice of books to convert is a very mixed bag. I will not repeat what I have already said about the actual books themselves in reviews elsewhere on this Blog, instead I will focus here on the presentation of these apps and the approaches taken in adapting them.

With the exception of Appointment With FEAR, all of these apps use conventional FF mechanics for rolling up characters, combat, attribute testing, etc and Tin Man have built in lovely animated dice that roll onto the “page” when needed. After a while, you will discover that it is possible to get a second-chance roll (if you are quick) by flicking the dice just after they have landed, although the outcome of this can go either way so you could get a far better result or find yourself wishing you had accepted the first roll! A big plus of the built-in dice rolling is that a) you don’t need to keep flicking to either a third party dice-rolling app or using actual dice (handy if you’re on a journey, in a hotel, or anywhere where realising you’ve forgotten your dice would otherwise scupper you), and b) you don’t need to do any maths as the app adds the totals and makes the necessary comparisons to stats before also making any necessary deductions etc. Additionally, in those situations where you have to read extended rules for specific combats, the app also factors in any adjustors and/or any extra dice rolls that are needed, thus making the whole process that much easier for the player. (It also means that you have to play fairly which does add to the challenge levels a lot.) The text itself is presented with the original paragraph numbers and even gives section numbers in the “turn to” prompts which, whilst purely cosmetic, does make these feel like paper gamebooks in the traditional sense. To choose where to turn to you touch a button next to your choice and, in a neat cheat-proofing move, choices that demand you have certain items or information are locked-out and cannot be selected unless you genuinely do have the requisites, which is really good to see and, as with dice rolling, this forces you to play the books properly without cheating. Obviously this means that the difficulty of the harder books amplifies itself but it does give you something to really get your teeth into although I’d imagine that had I played these versions as a child I would have quickly become very disillusioned with constantly dying all the time. Naturally, inventory and information are all stored for you and you can view these at any time - this also allows you to use your Potions and eat Provisions at will, just like in the books. To make the screen look more “book-y” the pages are sepia-tinted which gives a good impression of aged paper (we all have some fairly yellowed gamebook pages in our collections!), although it is possible to read with a clean white background if you are inclined to want the effect of a brand new book. Artwork is a subject we will come to in the app-by-app analysis as Tin Man has treated this differently depending on the particular app, but all of the “cover” pages have small animations, for example, the Shapechanger moves a bit on Forest Of Doom and lasers fire about on Starship Traveller. In addition to the gamebooks themselves, each app comes with a separate section that allows you to view the artwork en masse, along with a small write-up on the History Of Fighting Fantasy that makes for interesting reading for anyone who does not already know the story.

As is the case with all of Tin Man’s gamebook apps, an added feature is that of Achievements. Essentially, these are various moments throughout the book that, should you find them, will unlock an Achievement and credit it to you. The nature of what is needed to be done to unlock each Achievement is not a secret and you can check which you have and haven’t yet got in a special section where they are stored. Some books have more than others to find but all include completing the book on each difficulty setting and finding all of the artwork. The remainder vary from finding key plot moments, through acquiring particular items or finding (and sometimes besting, but also sometimes falling foul of) certain encounters, right through even to certain ways of losing. This adds an extra dimension to re-playability and means that your motivation does not drive you solely to finding victories. Some Achievements are very easy to unlock whilst others are extremely well hidden such as those that require approaching an area in a particular direction (House Of Hell has one of these, for example.) In fact, there are even some that can only be unlocked through cumulative actions across multiple playthroughs that absolutely demands replaying (eg: killing many more zombies than there actually are in the game in Blood Of The Zombies, or finding all of the artwork in any book at all given that the true path never leads to EVERY illustrated moment in a gamebook.) I personally really like trying to collect all of the possible Achievements in each app and they really do compel you to keep re-playing until you have unlocked them all, regardless of when (or if) you have actually beaten the book.

As is fairly normal for video games, it is possible to set a defined difficulty level from the outset. You can play the book exactly as it was designed which can mean that certain books’ excessive ease or difficulty can sometimes have quite an over-arching influence on success, you can choose a free-read option that unlocks all section links and allows back-tracking to previous sections if you go the wrong way (yes, we’ve all done that in the paper editions!), and, in some cases, there are even ultra-tough “Hardcore” modes which set starting restrictions on certain stats/Provision allowances/etc for those clever people who have bested the books once too often and need to go the extra mile to find a challenge.

…Which neatly brings us to the first adaptation in the series. Blood Of The Zombies is a notoriously difficult book, bordering on being impossibly hard to beat without cheating. Yes, it is statistically possible to have the dice fall in your favour EVERY time, but the probability is minute and this unfortunately somewhat overshadows the actual enjoyment of Tin Man’s first FF app. I liked the book, but I know that a lot of FF fans did not feel the same way. As an app it is both good and bad. The wholesale slaughter combat mechanic carried over from the book works well in app form, especially as each hit you make on an opponent is accompanied by an appropriate sound effect to add gory death-dealing fun, but I’m not convinced by the playability in terms of actually winning. Three difficulty levels are offered: Free Read (aka the one where you can actually finish the book!), Medium where you start with 2d6+40 Stamina ie DOUBLE what you got even in the “easier” revised version of the original book, and Hardcore which gives you the revised book’s 2d6+20 Stamina. An interesting foible of the book was that it was never made clear whether your Stamina could not exceed its Initial level meaning that you could keep building your Stamina up by using Medi-Kits with no upper limit on how much Stamina you could have. The app version, however, does not allow this and will cap your Stamina off at your starting level. This means that you are not likely to stand much chance of getting past Zombie Kong and, the rare occasions that you do, the three-fold multi-zombie pile-up that happens shortly afterwards is almost certain to finish you off… and that’s just in Medium mode! I’ve tried umpteen times to finish the app on this mode and, no matter how strong a character I begin with, and no matter how closely I follow the true path and get really good dice rolls along the way meaning I take minimal damage in zombie combats, I just cannot get past the triple-threat zombie-a-thon just before the end. Surely that must mean that, in real terms, it is effectively impossible to beat the app on Hardcore mode? Whilst you do get unlimited bookmarks to save critical points that will take some re-negotiating, even this does not balance out against the ultra-harsh final sections. It will not be long before you resort to Free Read as the only realistic way of beating this app and finding the majority of the Achievements and I suspect that very few of us will ever unlock the Medium or Hardcore victory achievements. In fact, I have all of them bar these two and have long-since abandoned my campaign to try to get them. A real winner with this one is that Kev Crossley’s book art is reproduced here in glorious (and gory) colour which looks fantastic and really brings the book to life. There is the option to switch it to black-and-white but why would you want to as the colourised art adds so much horror to the proceedings?

Blood Of The Zombies is beautifully presented by Tin Man and exudes quality in its execution. Its selection as the first app was logical given how new it was at the time and the idea of it being a 30^th Anniversary offering to kick off the app series is a sound one, it just doesn’t represent what FF is in the strictest sense and it gets weighed-down due to its sheer difficulty. Still, as an indication of this app series’ potential, it still scores highly.

After an Ian Livingstone effort, next came a Steve Jackson adaptation in the form of House Of Hell. Easily one of the best of the original Puffin series, HoH was another extremely difficult book to complete, down to, in no small part, the huge number of traps and red herrings strewn about its map, but its main reason for being so hard was the hidden section puzzles built into the true path (well, that and the fact that you need a minimum Fear of 9 to be able to win.) A fiendish and also rather irritating feature of many of SJ’s FFs is the mechanic of expecting the reader to know when to try to turn to hidden sections rather than explicitly prompting this. Tin Man’s version gets around this by prompting you to select these as long as you have acquired the necessary information to be able to find them. Clearly, this makes the app version that little bit easier and, as long as you have Fear >9 and stick strictly to the optimum path, beating this one even on Hardcore mode is not actually that difficult to do. As with BotZ before it there are three play modes offered: Hardcore has you roll-up your starting stats as per the book (possibly an indication of how hard the source material really is); Medium gives you Stamina of 2d6+24, Fear of 1d6+9 (ie the lowest possible is 10 which is over the 9 point bottom line) and standard starting Skill and Luck; and Free Read unlocks everything as always. The usual unlimited bookmarks are given again on all modes but they are far less critical this time around unless you really haven’t yet found the true path, although using Free Read and note-taking will eventually reveal this to you. Tin Man have reused Tim Sell’s internal art and this is another one that really benefits from being colourised (although, again, you get the option of viewing in monochrome should you wish to) – the use of rich reds and dark colours add a lot of atmosphere and, alongside the yellows of decay, really do highlight the juxtaposition of high-class decadence and horrific decay that the house is meant to portray. They are many Achievements to find including one that involves you gradually finding every weapon through multiple playthroughs which is really quite a task, along with an amusingly dark one where you have to slip in some spilled blood.

House Of Hell is a real winner, primarily thanks to the brilliance of the source book, but also due to it being converted in such a way that it is genuinely beatable without the years of fruitless attempts that the book demands.

After two rather uncharacteristic choices, Tin Man finally opted for a traditional medieval Skill-Stamina-Luck outing for its third conversion: Ian Livingstone’s The Forest Of Doom. The game map on the original book is far more expansive than those for either of the previous two adaptations and there are numerous inter-connecting paths through the forest that, in many ways, make it akin to an external dungeon layout and, more importantly, offers loads of re-playability. However, FoD is also notoriously easy to complete (light relief after BotZ and HoH) which makes this app more of an “explore and see/collect everything” motive than one to fathom out the true path of. For that reason, the Achievements this time around are often slightly abstract and many involve finding obscure detail rather than obvious things, although there are still a few blatant ones to get too, including completing it in all modes, as always. Again, there are three play modes available: Hardcore which limits your starting Skill to 1d6+4, Adventurer (note the new name for Medium given the idiom this time around) is as per the book, and Free Read is self-explanatory by this point. Even Hardcore mode is easy due to the nature of this adventure and being limited to a maximum Skill of 10 in this mode is not that much of an issue as long as you have decent Stamina and Luck. As usual, you get unlimited bookmarks in each mode too which makes it all even simpler. When this app first came out it seemed unusually glitchy and paused a lot but, after numerous updates, the problem soon went away and it then played as smoothly as the previous two. I have been uncompromising in my criticism of Malcolm Barter’s art for FoD in the past and, whilst some of it still looks pretty terrible in the coloured version presented here, there are some images that can only really be appreciated in colour such as Yaztromo’s Tower and the crypt which benefit massively from being colourised and now look really great which has made me appreciate just how good the original art could have been if presented in the more sympathetic manner that it is now (although you can still view it in black-and-white as usual in the app, if you really want to.) For the first time in a Tin Man FF app we are presented with mechanics to deal with Gold Pieces and also a map. When you go to buy items (ie at the start in Yaztromo’s Tower), the app deducts the relevant amounts as you make purchases and progressively begins to lock out anything that costs more money than you have left which is another nice bit of cheat-proofing that raises the mechanics above the inherent limitations of the book. The map gradually builds up as you play but is not really much use as it only traces where you have been so far and resets itself each time you die and have to restart the game which pretty much defeats the object of mapping in what is a true path/item hunt gamebook. You are also given the standard FF starting Potion choice and you can use these at any time by accessing your Inventory, ditto Provisions.

The Forest Of Doom is the earliest original series FF book to be released by Tin Man as a standard digital gamebook - they have produced the even earlier The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain but this conversion was of a very different nature and is not within the scope of this write-up – and its seminal quality outweighs its ease in making it a great choice to convert. It is much more conventional than the magic-oriented The Citadel Of Chaos and, given what Tin Man had in store for WOFM, it’s the earliest “generic” FF book they could choose for this particular series of apps. I was pleased when this was released as I wanted to see how Tin Man would handle a traditional FF outing given that their own Gamebook Adventures series is very much standard medieval fantasy and the result is great fun to play and offers a much more casual experience than the intensity of the first two FF apps.

I for one was hoping that Tin Man’s next medieval choice would be the superb City Of Thieves but instead they pitched a bit of a curve-ball with the often-overlooked Island Of The Lizard King, again by Ian Livingstone. The original book polarises opinion with some (myself included) thinking it very imaginative and well-considered in spite of its extreme linearity and relative ease, whilst others (with good cause) find it far too restrictive in terms of options to explore and much too easy. What everyone agrees on is that, without a Skill in double-figures and an equally high Luck you won’t get very far at all! This means that choosing to play in Hardcore mode which involves generating your Skill as 1d6+4 does make this rather more challenging than the book version. Add to this the fact that Hardcore mode only allows you THREE starting Provisions and you genuinely finally have a satisfyingly challenging version of IotLK to silence the nay-sayers. Obviously, playing in Adventurer (the idiom is back again) can still be tough with low stats but the vast number of bonuses (especially to Skill) will make this (and Hardcore mode, in fact) that little bit easier, but you can always choose to not bother collecting the items that make combat too easy. Free Read is available again too but this tends to come in more handy for unlocking all the other Achievements and art here rather than as an aid in unravelling the true path, as there isn’t one as such. Potions and Provisions are back again from the start, as would be expected. The over-riding primeval feel of the book was greatly helped by Alan Langford’s art and it is very appropriately colourised in this app to keep it in context. I would have been very disappointed if Tin Man had changed the art as it was key in this book and thankfully they kept the original just as it was. This is the first example of a FF app where setting the art to black-and-white works just as well as it does in colour and I have played it that way as many times as I have in colour, which is a first for me with these conversions. I must mention the animated gonchong on the cover screen too as it twitches in a very unsettlingly sinewy manner that really emphasises its unpleasantness!

Bringing this book back into peoples’ views and allowing it to be re-assessed in this modern format is a good thing to see and hopefully the app version will make those who right it off as too easy or devoid of any real options for exploration see it for what it is, especially as hardcore mode has made the challenge level much more balanced.

After two Horror and two Medieval efforts, it was inevitable that we would have to accept that a Sci-Fi FF was likely to get the Tin Man treatment sooner or later. Starship Traveller is not a good gamebook, I think most of us agree on that. However, as Tin Man seem to be limited to only being able to get permission to use works by Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, and Jonathan Green, that only gave three viable Sci-Fi options: this one, Appointment With FEAR or Freeway Fighter. A Jackson effort was more likely after two consecutive Livingstones and, in fact, both of SJ’s Sci-Fi books were digitised in this series, but ST was the first of the two.  So how do you deal with a problem like Starship Traveller? Let’s face it, the likelihood of many FF fans being interested in having to re-tread the fairly empty experience that is this book is low. To their credit, Tin Man tackled this by pulling all the wires out of the back and sort of starting again, addressing as many of the book’s shortcomings as was realistically plausible without just writing a different new book entirely, and they presented a considerably re-booted ST.

The main issues with the original book from my perspective were: 1) endless rolling-up of secondary crew members’ stats that took away time that would be better used actually playing the adventure; 2) uninteresting line art that was devoid of depth or anything that fired the imagination (Sci-Fi is meant to be a semi-visual genre, after all); 3) dull plotting and uninspired locales/encounters; 4) the problem of being able to complete the book without touching the dice (once you’ve spent ages creating your crew, that is); 5) the relative brevity of the mission proper, leading to repeatedly reaching the end only to fail because you don’t have the correct combination of co-ordinates to escape the Seltsian Void. Obviously, numbers 3 and 5 are difficult to resolve without major re-writes so, unfortunately, they are still rather apparent. The good news is that numbers 1 and 4 have work-arounds now, 5 has a slight tweak to the climax, and number 2 is completely eliminated. You can, if you choose to, still roll-up stats for every one of your crew members (and even use a different custom-named ship instead of the Traveller, although it’s the same ship in all but name) but the better option is now given to use a pre-generated crew which saves a lot of time but does put you at the mercy of the game as you cannot fudge the dice rolls to try to get stronger side-kicks. Personally, I think this is a big leap forward. The original book’s art was, let’s be honest, woefully bad and really did nothing to help us visualise the rather flat attempt SJ had made to present the book’s universe. Tin Man’s version has newly-commissioned art by Simon Lissaman that is far better than the book’s. For example, the rain planet looks far more atmospheric, the Adventure Game-style vortex is much more futuristic looking, and the formerly pathetic humanoid Dar-Villians are now reptilian creatures that manage to appear both intelligent and menacing-looking at the same time. To further emphasise just how much better the new art is, for the first time Tin Man have not given us the option to de-make the art and view it in the original back-and-white, which I think speaks for itself. By all accounts, the new art is far more apt to the material, is colourful, and is just generally much more imaginative and makes playing a far more positive experience as opposed to the dour half-finished look of the book art. A new cover image was also created which is a bit more old school comic-bookish than the book’s original and I did actually rather like the crew vs killer robot cover of the book but the new cover screen is nice too. Likewise, rather than the usual sepia-toned “pages”, this app has a futuristic look to it with neon colours on dark backgrounds, ship schematics, incoming missile warnings and lots of other command deck gubbins to give the feel of a starship bridge. Again, this really lifts the impact of the piece. To top it off, even the dice animations are black with white glowing dots this time around. Sadly, the reskinning does not draw us away from the fact that the text and the adventure itself are the same old dull material from the original book, but the showy presentation does at least make it look far classier. Likewise, the fact that you can go right through without needing the dice still exists, although you will take many attempts to find the safe true path so this might go unnoticed. Interestingly, combats can be played-out in the traditional FF manner or there is also a Quick Combat option (handy for frays involving multiple opponents on both sides) that greatly accelerates these situations and seems to be based on correctly aligning a moving bar within a Skill box. I like this option and I have used it on every playthrough of this app. Obviously, the short nature of the optimum path is another thing that could not be avoided by directly porting the original text over, but this adaptation does add two elements to alleviate this a bit: firstly, a nicely-rendered map of the route you have taken gradually builds itself (including colour and names for planets etc) which adds a bit of depth to your routing (although, as with FoD, it erases itself on each re-start), whilst in the final analysis when you have to crunch any co-ordinates you might have found you also have the option to just roll a dice and take a chance on escaping the void, although you must roll a 6 to do so. Still, this does remove some of the soul-destroying nature of constantly failing over and over and is a slight variation on the book.

For the first time, with ST, Tin Man have only offered two difficulty options: the re-named Classic is exactly as the book, whilst the usual Free Read option is also given. Both modes also give unlimited bookmarks, as is the norm in these apps. I don’t really understand why there is no Hardcore mode offered this time as, once you’ve found the true path, this is not especially difficult as a gamebook and it would have given the added challenge option that those before it had. The Achievements this time around are very inventive and involve you getting into lots of sticky situations. Particularly fun is the one that involves you getting your entire crew killed-off and having to go it alone which, given just how many expendable underlings you have got, is easier said than done!

StarshipTraveller has benefited hugely from this conversion. Yes, the adventure is still as excitement-free as the book version, but Tin Man’s presentation is excellent and we finally have a Starship Traveller that is enjoyable to play, albeit on a mostly visual basis.

After re-thinking Starship Traveller, Tin Man went hell-for-leather in their deconstruction of the next book they chose to convert, Steve Jackson’s superhero romp Appointment With FEAR. Let’s be clear from the outset that I hate this book as an adventure but I give it the respect it is due in terms of it being an example of very clever gamebook design, what with its four distinct paths through and its hidden section clue use mechanic.

As soon as you start Appointment With FEAR it is apparent that this is going to be rather different to its series predecessors. Presented as an interactive comic book, slides of text in a suitably comic book-y font appear as you read, with interspersed images where these existed in the original book, detailing your birth and how you came to possess super powers. As with the book, you choose which one of the four super powers you want to have and then comes an overlong series of choices where, in video game style, you choose a name from hundreds of options (I am always Stretchy Moth which is one of the less ludicrous monikers on offer, if you can imagine that concept for a moment!), then build up a multi-coloured suit design that is a million miles away from the source book’s Silver Crusader look. This time you are more imposing and almost X-Man-looking and already, at this earliest of stages, this app does not seem much like Appointment With FEAR anymore. However, once you’ve designed your character and started the adventure itself, the text and structure are exactly as per the book, it’s just the intentionally comic book look that is very different. Curiously though, combat is also drastically different in this app. Rather than being the traditional FF Attack Strength rolling process, instead you choose from a selection of blows to strike to different body parts. I have never managed to really master this and the outcomes do seem somewhat arbitrary which makes combat clumsy and rather biased against you, especially when fighting the tougher foes and beating the Creature Of Carnage (Sk 12 St 14 in the book) in particular is incredibly difficult using the app’s revised combat method. I must have failed at least 20 times before I bested him and was bored with endlessly re-living this battle long before I had finally won it. The book’s relatively meaningless Hero Points are back again although the 60s Batman-style “Kapow” starbursts that greet the winning or losing of these (and Luck and Clues too, in fact) are a nice contextual touch. The book’s challenge was very high, due mostly to your needing to randomly guess the right moments to use Clues and deduct or add numbers to find hidden sections. Tin Man eased this in their House Of Hell app by prompting you at the relevant moments, but Appointment With FEAR leaves it to you to decide when to follow clues up, just as the book does. Naturally, this does make the app just as hard as the book and beating it is very tough indeed. In fact, after the crushingly difficult Blood Of The Zombies, this is probably the second hardest of all Tin Man’s FF app series for this reason alone. A completely new concept that was only included in this one app is the collecting of Trading Cards (digital ones, that is.) I have only got a few but it is apparently possible to trade with friends by linking up your Android devices, but I have not attempted this myself because, in all honesty, after a few playthroughs, the novelty of the comic book presentation began to wear off and I realised it’s just the book after all and, as I never liked the book much, I decided I couldn’t really be bothered to play this app more than just a handful of times.

Appointment With FEAR is visually very well designed, although the approach used is distracting and, whilst very original, this is basically just the book with all its hidden section tricks in place to both impress you with its mechanics and to frustrate you with the lack of any real signposting as to how you are ever going to complete it. I’ve heard reports that some people have never managed to get this app to work on their devices, but I have never had this problem myself. I do have the problem, though, that I have long-since lost all motivation to play it! Yes, it’s a lovely bit of design from the coders and I can’t take that away from them but it’s still just a gamebook that I have very little time for. I have not mentioned the subject of Achievements in this review – they are included again but I cannot find the menu where they are stored so I just stumbled across a smattering of them as I played so I cannot really comment on what they involve.

At Fighting Fantasy Fest 2014 Tin Man’s Neil Rennison gave an interesting teaser-talk on forthcoming FF apps. The one that was about to be released at that time was the seventh in this series, Ian Livingstone’s Caverns Of The Snow Witch. The focus of the talk was mostly around yet more new artwork that was being created for this conversion. Starship Traveller was improved a lot by Tin Man when they completely changed the artwork. I am in two minds though about how I feel about the decision to re-work Snow Witch’s unique woodcut internal art. The new art in the app is much more traditional fantasy art and, whilst at times undeniably beautiful (the Pegasus springs straight to mind) and in some places just much better (the Snow Dogs and the Dragon), the book is always remembered for the brave decision to go for very unconventional art and the original’s Crystal Warrior stands out in my memory as particularly impressive (indeed, this is one image that the new art did no favours for!) Thankfully, the app gives you the choice of either playing using the new full-colour art or the original black-and-white woodcut art from the book, which is a really pleasing inclusion. Interestingly, the original Puffin cover art was retained for the cover screen which, again, I’m pleased about, as this worked fine as it was. As this is a return to conventional Medieval adventuring fare after two Sci-Fi efforts, the now familiar Tin Man playing mode choices of Hardcore, Adventurer, or Free Read are all back again. Anyone who has played the book will know that, without stats in double-figures (preferably maxed-out!) you have little chance of completing this adventure. As with the other Medieval apps, you have the usual choice of starting Potions and get 10 Provisions in Adventurer mode. Hardcore offers you the Potions as read, but only gives you THREE Provisions again and starts you with a Skill of 1d6+4, as was the case with IotLK. This worked fine in IotLK as that book is very easy. But, putting this restriction on as hard a book as CotSW just makes it downright unfair. Completing this in Adventurer (ie standard “as the book was written” mode) is far from a simple task, but Hardcore mode seems to be near-terminally difficult. On that basis, I doubt many people will anticipate getting the Hardcore Win Achievement in this one then! That said, the other Achievements this time are the usual mix of win, sort of lose, and simply fail moments to unlock and they are as fun to find as they are in the other apps in this series so this alone is good enough motivation to keep playing, although the source material’s sheer length will make finding all the artwork in particular a task to test the staying-power of the best of us.

As with all Tin Man’s conversions, I cannot fault the work that has gone into coding another extremely well-presented FF conversion in Caverns Of The Snow Witch. The shortcomings of the original book (excessive length, extreme difficulty, ultra-linearity) are unavoidable in a direct porting and are not Tin Man’s fault, but I would happily have substituted this one for either City Of Thieves or Temple Of Terror any day so I do question the choice of book with this one more than I would any other entry in this series.

Just over two years after these conversions first appeared, the eighth and final offering came in December 2014 in the shape of Bloodbones. This is the only non-SJ/IL book to be converted, this one being by Jonathan Green. Note at this point that Tin Man had already released the rather similar Green gamebook Temple Of The Spider God in their own Gamebook Adventures app series. Bloodbones is another extremely difficult gamebook, arguably even harder than Caverns Of The Snow Witch due to its extreme linearity and a series of ultra-strong foes to fight in the final stages, although the more excessively tough fights have had their stats reduced slightly in this version and, whilst still very strong, they are now realistically win-able. Bloodbones is also exceptionally good which puts it head and shoulders above CotSW in my estimation and I was pleased to see this one being chosen as the next app. As this is another Medieval adventure, we are once again offered the choice to play in Hardcore, Adventurer, or Free Read mode. Adventurer is the same as the book, Free Read is cheat mode, and the Hardcore win is unlikely to be very achievable if we weigh up the difficulty of the book with having a starting Skill again of only 1d6+4 and a starting Gold Pieces of a just-on-the-limit-for-success 14GP. Yes, we have unlimited bookmarks again in all modes and, yes, you are going to need them, even in Adventurer mode! As the book itself was only finally published in 2006 its internal art was more contemporary than the older Puffin material and there was little need to change it so all Tin Man did was colourise Tony Hough’s generally excellent art. You do get the choice to switch back to black-and-white again if you want to and both modes are equally good, although I do not like TH’s people (as I have said in my review of the book itself) and colourising some plates, in particular Cinnabar himself, has made certain characters look totally unthreatening. The flip-side of this of course is that the more frightening images from the book are made to look even more unsettling in colour so there are as many pluses as there are minuses with the colourisation. JG’s gamebooks often involve a lot of combats with adjustors to factor in so Tin Man’s self-sufficient dice mechanics are a great help here and allow you to concentrate on the richness of the plot and the variety and pace of the adventure, rather than on number-crunching, which is always a good thing. Needless to say, Achievements are back as is standard for Tin Man apps and the usual enjoyable mix of situations that you have to get yourself into to unlock them is as should be expected by now.

Bloodbones, as we know, was to be the original Puffin series’ swansong. Things didn’t quite pan-out as planned and we had to wait years for the book to finally surface in print. That Tin Man chose to end its main “conventional” digital FF app series with this one is a wise choice both for this reason, but also because it is very very good.

I have played Tin Man’s non-FF apps as well as their FF ones and I have never been disappointed by how they are designed and programmed. Tin Man puts huge effort into its gamebooks and the results are always of exceptional quality. My only real gripe with this eight-app series is the rather uneven choice of source material but the balance between horror, Sci-Fi, and traditional fantasy is very effective and gives a good overview of FF as a whole. The Achievements concept adds much more than just winning to the playing experience and Tin Man have put their own unique (and often improving) stamp on the books that they have made fundamental visual changes to. All the apps remain faithful to the original books and all are worthy additions to the FF world as well as translating the FF gamebook form into a 21^st Century medium. Get them all, even if you don’t especially like some of the source books, just get these apps as the visuals and mechanics alone make these all winners.