These game booklets are solo RPGs -- essentially choose your own adventure books, but with a character sheet (which you download and mark separately) that alters as you make your choices and roll for successes. This makes it much more flexible on your choices and luck and does feel like it splits the difference between the two.

The writing is great, very engaging while remaining very functional at getting the game information across, and with a bit of thrill and chill to it. You have your choice of three characters to play through, but though they have different stats, they don't have significantly different personalities due to all being in second tense and often hitting the same pages; I kind of wish they'd stuck with just one or two and gave them more unique versions of their own pages.

The storyline is fairly brief; very easy to get through one playthrough in about 20 minutes. Understandable since a narrative game can balloon hugely based on the number of choices available, though.

I'm not sure about why we had the secrets or super secrets in here; they're a checklist only and don't result in any additional endings to view or anything of the sort. I guess they're like a video game achievement, but it felt like an odd fit.

All in all, it's fun; I probably wouldn't replay to try to see everything, but I enjoyed the time I spent with it and it was a great example of the genre.

This was very fun! Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC and a pleasant 2 hours procrastinating on my conference paper.

I never really liked the choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid, because they always seemed full of pointless bullshit that got you killed for no reason, so I was a little leery going in here. However, the implementation of dice rolls completely removed that problem, so it was fine, enjoyable even! I haven't played any ttrpgs in a hot minute, and this definitely scratched the itch.

I played through the story once with each profile, and I'm rather sorry that I started with the one that sounded the most interesting to me, because that was the one that finished the most quickly due to my poor decisions. I did much more exploring with the other two. I found that I mostly forgot about optional buffs that I could use, and I didn't really need to use them anyway, but the debuffs were quite fun and led to me getting 10 doom on Silas's run. It definitely rewards replaying, even aside from the literal checklist of prompts to find. I felt like I went to different places on all three runs, which was fun.

The story itself was whatever? I feel that it's a bit unfair to say that, considering that this is the first book of its type that I've read, and it has to be simplistic, but the nature of the beast means that you can't tie in characters particularly closely to the setting. I liked what they did with Silas and wish that there had been more of it for him. Maybe there was for other characters and I just didn't see it? I don't know. There were any particularly egregious men writing women moments at least, aside from when the narrative got a little weird about the bookshop owner's "attractiveness".

I'm very pleased to have found out about this type of book because now I have presents for several people on lock for the foreseeable future, and I'd definitely play another book.