TSR, $2.00, ISBN 0-935696-87-3
Fantasy, 1982

The hills are alive with the… oh hold for a second.

In Mountain of Mirrors, you are an elf named Landon. You are five feet five inches tall. Although slender, you are very strong and quick on your feet. You are 270 years old. Since elves live to be about 1200 years old, you are still in your early teens in human years. Your hair is a dark chestnut-brown and hangs straight to your shoulders. Your eyes are emerald green. Like all elves, you have elvensight allowing you to see objects in the dark by the heat they give off. You speak a number of languages, including those of ores, goblins, ogres and halflings as well as the “common” language of humans.

If being a teenager that is almost 300 years old isn’t depressing enough, you’re also a member of a Mary Sue race – an elf that comes complete with the pointless snobbery, elitism, and unearned sense of entitlement. That’s not all. Wait until you learn about the plot you will be thrust into.

You live in a village called Alaria in the shadow of the Mountain of Mirrors. There is a problem: no traders have arrived in the last three months. Despite their elvensight, beautiful hair, and what not, these adults clearly unable to fend for themselves, so they are now worried as supplies are running low. Have you ever wondered then why these people chose to live in such an isolated place? At any rate, these people decide that someone has to go investigate what is happening out there. The people they have sent in the past all never returned, so now they decided that only one person can do what many failed.

So, they held a lottery and your name is picked to be the lucky fellow. This plan is so amazing, what can go wrong? Even better, they give you, the untrained noob, their most powerful sword, because surely it will never be lost when you get slain by the first orc you come across, leaving the village without any secret weapon left up their rear ends to defend themselves with. Then again, this sword makes noise in the presence of enemies, thus making sure you will never be able to sneak past anyone, so perhaps they are lying to you and they actually just want to be rid of this useless thing.

And then you have to face 22 – twenty-two! – pages of exposition, involving saving an elf who then dies of grief and guilt, as his brother died trying to save him – before you are allowed to make your first choice. You will have to make your way into the mountain that gives this gamebook its title, and avoid being stabbed by orcs, ogres, goblins, and other green clichés.

This campaign is more like a short kiddie story cut up at places for options to be plonked in, with actually very few choices compared to a more standard gamebook campaign. Even then, the whole thing feels off. Judging from the only one “good ending” here, the only criteria to succeed is to make it out to the other side of the mountain alive, so it doesn’t matter how many turns and twists you take inside the mountain – you can accidentally reach that ending once via a quick, straightforward route, only to take a second, longer, more tortuous route in a second play, only to eventually reach that same ending too. Hence, getting to that ending doesn’t feel like an achievement at all, as everything you do in the Mountain of Mirrors feels pointless. All you need to do is to get to the other side, and knowing now that there are brutes in the mountain blocking everyone’s way, you can now head back and tell your people, the end. How satisfying!

The bad endings are gently done, as this campaign is aimed at kids after all, so you will be invited to try again. Oh, you get captured? Don’t worry, you’ll get away soon enough, but why don’t you try again in the meantime? That kind of thing.

Also, the illustrations of your character make you look more like a halfling or, Pelor forbid, a kender. Guess that is a design choice?

At any rate, Mountain of Mirrors may do as a bedtime story for nine-year olds, but anyone older may soon feel bored by the whole thing. Chalk this one as another example as to why playing elves in gamebooks is for wusses.