Bantam, $3.50, ISBN 0-553-26791-4
Suspense, 1987
RA Montgomery’s Danger Zones is a Super Adventure edition of Choose Your Own Adventure, which is a long-winded way of saying that this campaign is somewhat longer than an average entry in this line. Does this mean that the routes here would be longer and less likely to come to an abrupt end?
Sadly, no, as one of the earliest routes you can take ends with the action abruptly ended to reveal that it’s all a nightmare you are having. What the Humpty Dumpty…
Okay, you play a brat whose three older brothers form the Society of Adventurers. Your brothers go on exciting adventures every year, which you can only wonder is a code for the trafficking of weapons, drug, or flesh. Maybe it’s all three, because it sure seems like none of them work and somehow still can get all the money they want to travel around the world on a regular basis.
This year, they allow to you to join them. You are 13 now, the right age to get involved with dangerous things and people all around the world, so yay, off to adventures you go!
Thing is, they are all going in separate directions, so you will have to pick one of them to tag along with. Will it be to Takla Makan with Michael, to locate a caravan containing lots of treasure that went missing 200 years ago?
Perhaps you’d like go with Pete to look for “secret age-old writings” from some temple that were lost somewhere in an “unclimbed ridge” in the Nepalese side of the Himalayas? You can only wonder how the ridge can be “unclimbed” when clearly someone climbed there to lose those writings there in the first place, or that those old writings can’t be much of a “secret” if people already know of them.
Sam wants to look for two missing Americans in Hong Kong, which he describes to a hub for smugglers, drug dealers and users, kidnappers, and corrupt cops. Boy, this Hong Kong sounds far more exciting than the real thing!
So yes, you will pick one brother to go along with, and hence you will encounter many exciting twists and turns along the way.
Well, that’s the intention, anyway, but in reality, just like Hong Kong is actually just boring and smelly in the 1980s, this one just means Mr Montgomery gets to do more of his random, abrupt, often pointless routes in greater numbers.
You’d think that the greater length of this campaign means more opportunity for better fleshed out routes and arcs, but nope, here, just have more of “Oh, it’s just a dream!”, “Oh, you’re suddenly dead!”, “Oh, choke on this abrupt ending, LOL!” nonsense. Many routes feel like Mr Montgomery is coming up with half-assed stuff to pad the entries, and others just have a “The end” crashing on your head out of nowhere, maybe because he had to run to do a number two at that time or he was just bored, who knows.
It’s all a wasted opportunity, but worse, it’s an eye-rolling one. The first few entries and the promise of a bumper-sized campaign can lead you to believe that this one will take you places, only to find that those places are nothing remotely like the promised land.
