Puffin Books, £3.50, ISBN 0-14-032601-4
Sci-fi, 1988

The best thing about Sky Lord is the introductory pages, which tells you that you are a four-armed assassin named Jang Mistral, and your quest is to take down the villain L’Bastin. L’Bastin is the mad but brilliant sort that has amassed an army of dog-headed clones to, what else, conquer the whole damned universe, and you’ll have to go over to his fortress at some planet called Aarok to take him down.

Well, all that is good, even exciting, until the campaign officially begins and you are asked to make random choices. There are no explanations or descriptions that will help you make some kind of educated guess as to what each option may entail. No, you just have to pick one. This is basically the entire campaign in a nutshell. Random choices, random outcomes, and oh goody, random deaths. When you do find the good ending, it’s like emerging from a maze after having wandered in it for weeks without any rest, and that’s even if you toughed it out and replayed the campaign just to randomly find where the essential items are. It’s a lot of joyless work for very little payoff.

Then, there are the extra combat modes involving spaceships. You can become better at space battles the more you win such battles, but this campaign is quite unfair in the sense that every other enemy you face will be far stronger than you in every way. This isn’t a big deal, as you can always cheat, but where’s the fun in cheating just to win some annoying mooks? Weirdly enough, the more traditional one-on-one combat encounters are fairly easy. Guess Martin Allen only goes into Jonathan Green mode whenever spacecrafts are involved.

Still, there is some mild amusement to be had in how surreal and even bizarre you will find yourselves in as the campaign progresses. The NPCs and enemies you meet have absurd names—Gobblepotamus, anyone?—and the narrative becomes increasingly bizarre too. Characters will say things that seem deliberately designed to wacky and zany. Couple all of this to the stupid LOLrandom nature of the whole campaign and you’ll find a campaign that seems to be the manifestation of Martin Allen’s acid dream.

Sure, Sky Lord is a pretty bizarre and fascinating thing, especially when read like a novel. Play it as the gamebook it is, though, and get ready for one of the most boring, tedious, and even unfair experiences in your gamebook-playing career.