The Forest of Doom is a choose your own adventure book. A so-called “fighting fantasy” book, as you progress through it you

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YOU are the hero in Forest of Doom! Explore the sinister Darkwood Forest in Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy classic RPG gamebook![/quote]

A choose your own adventure book from the 1980s, this book was designed to introduce children to roleplaying. It is, quite frankly, awful. But why is it so bad?

The book starts off with random stat generation – which means that you can have wildly varying statistics. That’s right, in this choose your own adventure book, the outcome of combat events (and a few other events) is randomized using 2d6 plus a stat bonus, and you take damage. The combat system is very simple and incredibly boring because there are no real choices to be made – you either fight or flee every round, and there’s really nothing more to it than that. It is all randomized, without any meaningful input on the player’s part, thus making it rather pointless – if you have good stats, you’ll win all your combat encounters, and if you don’t, you’ll probably die.

From that point, you then head off on your adventure. You promptly run into a dying dwarf named Bigleg, who entrusts you with the task of finding the two halves of a hammer in a forest and bringing them to the dwarves, so that they can beat some trolls who are attacking them.

You then promptly end up on the front porch of a wizard, which you have 30 gold pieces to buy a large amount of equipment from. Yes, that’s right, you have an inventory in this game… and you have to buy equipment blind, as it is only useful in specific encounters, and you have absolutely no way whatsoever of knowing which encounters those are or whether or not you will encounter them.

That’s right – trial and error gameplay. And it isn’t even the worst form of it.

The second, and even worse form of trial and error gameplay is when you have purchased your equipment, you are given the choice of going west or going east.

If you go west at the start, you have absolutely no way of succeeding in your quest, as you will miss one of the hammer pieces, get to the end, and have to start over, because there is absolutely no way to backtrack in this game – you must always go north, west, or east, and can never go back to a previously visited location. If you miss one of the two hammer pieces, which are distributed in the woods in places that you may well not even run across, you will have to start the whole thing over to find them.

This is incredibly obnoxious – you choose your path more or less blindly, and one of the pieces requires two specific items which can only be found in specific encounters which you may well not run across. Worse still, it isn’t even good storytelling, and means you’re going to have to run through the book at least twice, if not more, at an hour plus per run through, to figure out how to beat it.

And what do you get for finding the two parts of the hammer and completing your quest? A helmet worth “hundreds of gold pieces” and wealth beyond your wildest dreams. You don’t help the dwarves fight the trolls; the story just ends at that point.

Such poor storytelling is endemic to the work; the entirety of the adventure feels incredibly random and eclectic, like they just randomly picked monsters out of a D&D monster manual and distributed them into the forest. Almost all of the choices you make are made blind, and you have no reasonable idea whether putting on a ring is going to give you a permanent bonus or a permanent penalty. There is no rhyme or reason to the adventure, and none of it really feels connected or satisfying.

Even the quality of the prose is pretty questionable; the writing feels amateurish, more like what a DM might write for exposition for an adventure on the spur of the moment, not a well thought-out work of coherent fiction.

There are better, absolutely free choose your own adventure books produced by random people on the Internet than this book, and frankly, even if there weren’t, this wouldn’t be worth your time – any video game or any real novel would be a better use of your money and effort.