Farshore, £12.99, ISBN 978-0-7555-0200-4
Puzzle Gamebook, 2022

Regardless of how you may feel about present-day Dungeons & Dragons turning into this weird hugbox for overgrown children that just want to imagine themselves as luminous genderqueer dark elves with butterfly wings spending all day discussing pronouns and playing the barista at some fantasy version of Starbucks—roll a d20, honey, and add your perception and knowledge (gender studies) modifiers to correctly identify that person’s preferred pronouns—just look at this thing of beauty.

It’s gorgeous. The illustrations by Ulisas Farinas, with coloring done by Gabriel Cassata, are just exquisite in a cute kiddie way, and it is going to be a hard save to resist buying this search and find adventure at first sight. 

On paper, there is nothing groundbreaking here. You have to locate the surprisingly sane-seeming beholder Myopus the All-Seeing (how cute, that name) and its gang of merry misfits in each spread, along with a band of adventurers and various other things. If you’ve played one of these things, you will know what to expect here.

Still, the size of this baby is large enough that you won’t need to squint so hard or use a magnifying glass to locate what you’re looking for, and the people behind this thing are fair enough that the illustrations are clear and well defined so that nothing is deliberately hidden or distorted to frustrate you.

In fact, you will likely find yourself distracted by the lush details in each spread that you just say to toss the whole search and find thing into Tiamat’s maw and just bask in the details of the illustrations.

Behold! is definitely a lovely addition to one’s bookcase if one is a Dungeons & Dragons fan of any kind, and it’s even arguable that it’s a better coffee table book than what it is intended to be. Hence, four oogies if you’re one of such fans, and if you’re not, well, who knows, maybe you’ll like the lovely illustrations!