Deathtrap Dungeon: The Interactive Video Adventure

The developers can be congratulated for putting together about the best presentation of the source material that could be asked for. But the source material simply makes for a terrible game. There's no skill or thought to anything. Make a random choice, get a random result that more often than not is catastrophic. At least every choice has a save point before it, so you don' have to keep starting over from the beginning. But if you actually want to keep playing, it's just a repeated cycle of making a flip a coin, random decision and then probably reloading from the prior checkpoint to make the different, equally logic-free choice that doesn't kill or nearly kill you. Do that over and over again, random choices with random outcomes. Just not fun at all.

I enjoyed stumbling my way through the dungeon trying to survive and figure out all the curve balls thrown at me. If you want a fun experience that will make you want to play real life tabletop games this is the one for you!

I had a good time - the added narration really adds to the experience. However, there were a fun things I really disliked. There was no way to pause the narration, so if something interrupts you, you'll need to replay the entire segment's audio, which isn't very long thankfully, but it was still annoying. The second thig I disliked is common problem of these choose your adventure games. One "wrong" choice and you are dead, and sometimes it's just picking left over right. It's fairly tame compared to some other games, but it can still be quite arbitrary. Luckily, there is a very good save system so it's easy to retry segments without restarting. However, this leads me to the third and worst point. The combat. It's a time consuming rolling of dice without any real input of the player - so you just kinda watch it unfold with no way to autoresolve it. Worst combat requires you to battle two enemies, and in a game that requires retrying paths, it's such a drag. Thankfully, the game doesn't outstay it's welcome so it's over before it's flaws really start to surface.

Deathtrap Dungeon is based on a book of the same name from the Fighting Fantasy series. This "choose your own adventure" book was published in 1984, and I remember buying it from WH Smith and playing through the adventure with my dice, pencil and character sheet. The narrator, Eddie Marsan, reads you a section of the story, then the game presents you with choices about what you want to do next (e.g. "go north" or "fight the monster"). Combat involves rolling a couple of dice vs. your opponent and adding the result to one of your character's attributes to determine who damages who. There is also a lot of rolling for luck. The presentation of the game is excellent and the interface and simple game rules make playing through the adventure straightforward. This is greatly enhanced by Eddie Marson's excellent narration. The problem is that, like the book, choices are not always obvious and you can be severely punished if you pick the wrong one. For example, depending on the route you pick, you might finally reach the dungeon exit without some essential items that you need to get out. There are no clues in your travels that you'll need these items and the game just finishes. Ho…

Superbly produced. Eddie Marsan is just perfect, as are the subtle sound effects, and the overall video and audio work. Also nicely subtle is how the game mechanics (there are "points" and "skills" and die rolls) are blended in without intruding on the storytelling. It's a thoughtful and very-well put together total experience. It's too bad that the source material is so mediocre. Ian Livingstone's original game was a silly dungeon crawler with a pointless background story and cringey challenges, basically what you would get if a bunch of 11-year-olds were playing D&D for the first time. This is not an "adventure", but rather a series of rooms with either good things or bad things in them, and more often than not it's all about just guessing. Will the left button give you a reward? Will the right button poison you? There's no thinking involved, no puzzles, and no satisfaction in choosing to "go north" rather than to "go west". After going about randomly for a while I got frustrated and looked up a walkthrough to finish the game. This is a wonderful and new way to make games. I hope it's applied in the future to content that's actually good. Unless you're playing this for researc…

loved the variety of gameplay