Scholastic, £6.99, ISBN 978-1407199-68-9
Fantasy, 2020
Much has been made about Crystal of Storms being written and designed by a “celebrity”, which is akin to having one’s favorite restaurant boasting that someone famous but has never cooked before is going to be making your favorite dish so you better clap your hands like a happy seal or else.
Sure, it’s Rhianna Pratchett… which you suppose is someone you should be excited to have onboard a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, but still, she has never done a gamebook before. A part of you can only wonder whether the result is a thing of grotesque monstrosity or sublime beauty.
Well, the first thing you will notice when you start playing this one is that this is a Fighting Fantasy gamebook in name only. Tonally, it’s completely different. The whole thing is just… cute. Just look at the cover. You will feel like the biggest monster of them all to mow these things down, even if you were slaughtering them out of self defense.
Even the setting, despite being said to be on Titan, is a self-contained place that doesn’t fit in well with the rest of the lands. You’ll be oppressing cute critters in Pangaria, an archipelago of floating islands mostly isolated and unknown by the rest of Titan because the whole place is in the eye of a permanent tempest in the Ocean of Tempests. Just think of all the happy inbreeding going on in there, shudder. Even the natives are different, most obvious being the Goblins that are now friendly, helpful stumpy sidekicks instead of foul-tempered, smelly things that exist only to be killed in undignified ways by mighty heroes. The whole place is like a reverse Australia, one with cute adorable creatures instead of deadly animals.
Oh, and the level of technology here is much higher than that in Allansia and other continents. On one hand, this makes sense, as there needs to be a way for people to travel around the floating islands, so flying ships are a natural evolution of this need. On the other hand… where do they get the materials to build this thing? Is this place like Wakanda where there is a special meteor that allows for hand-waving of questions that threaten to unravel logic and sense?
Anyway, you are a junior member of the Sky Watch, the “guardians of peace” in Pangaria, and you are doing your usual thing one day, being bossed around by your superiors that treat you like an errand person, when oops, the island Nimbus crashes down into the sea. Normally a disaster of this scale will mean deaths of thousands and panic, but because this campaign seems to be aimed at kids aged 12 or below, the whole thing is treated like a nuisance at best. Your job, therefore, is to go around the islands to look for clues as to what has happened and track down the villains behind this island-toppling perfidy.
While it can be a culture shock at first, this one isn’t too bad once you decide that the whole bewildering cutesy, kiddie tone of the campaign is like an acid trip, the result of your character sneaking in some elixirs of intoxicating nature while supposedly on duty. You may also appreciate some playful humor that may go over the heads of younger readers but tickle the funny bone of older ones that get the references and puns Ms Pratchett is aiming for.
Unfortunately, you will also realize very quickly how tedious the actual playing of the campaign can be. For example, you will explore three islands first early on, and it is way too easy to end up going around the same locations again and again. You will be aghast to realize that no one seems to have anticipated your character revisiting the same places, so you have to go through the whole thing again—the same encounters, the same fights with monsters that you have killed before, the same scenes where everyone act like they have never seen you before… what, is it so hard to have an entry that asks you to turn to a certain page if you had already visited a certain hell hole before?
This extends to the rest of the campaign. You have the agency to visit various places at any order, although this free flow, non-linear structure is for the most part an illusion. It’s an illusion because, as you wander around over and over the same few locations, it becomes apparent that there is an optimal path for you to pick up items or clues in a certain order to get the best results. It’s also tedious and boring to wander around like a clueless dolt.
The tedium is made worse by how sparsely developed the setting is. Each island feels very small, with you having the option of traipsing around two or three locations, and after a while, they all start to feel alike. You feel like you’re playing a Super Mario Bros game, only each map is the same, only with minor cosmetic variations.
It also doesn’t help that, for the most part, this campaign is pretty easy and free of suspense. There are a few tough combat encounters, oh yes, and there are also many moments when you lose Stamina points without any means to reduce the loss. At the same time, though, this campaign loves to throw at your face healing potions, food that recovers Stamina, and other opportunities to recover Stamina such as sleeping and what not. The campaign sometimes gives you an option to do something very obviously dumb or cruel, but when you pick that option, it chides you for wanting to stray outside of acceptable behavior by either making you lose some Stamina and Luck points or forcing you to do the right thing after all.
Hence, it can be hard to die in this campaign. This becomes a punishment in itself, as you may end up wishing super hard that your character will meet a bad end so that you can finally quit wandering around in a bored stupor!
Then, there is the need to track your progress with all the code words you need to record, all the notes about the various items you pick up as well, and other things. Let’s just say that playing this campaign soon feels like boring, tedious work.
Eventually, something in you snaps, and you skip straight to the final entry and read the best ending. You can discern the whole plot just from reading that entry, realize it’s not particularly interesting, and then finally ditch the whole thing to do something else more worthwhile.
At the end of the day, the tale in Crystal of Storms would probably be an interesting novel for young kids. As a gamebook, though, oh lord. Pangaria is a colorful, whimsical version of a layer of the Nine Hells, or perhaps a Domain of Dread, where everyone is tortured by unrelenting boredom… and death is never an option or escape.
