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Trial Of The Clone: An Interactive Adventure! (2012)

by Zach Weinersmith(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0982853726 (ISBN13: 9780982853726)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Breadpig

review 1: Ok, so I didn't know about the author before I got this off the App store at a discounted price. Would've skipped it had I known. The premise sounded interesting so I took the bait.I'll start with the mechanics. The system is pretty simple and for the most part works. It's just that the challenges are pretty unevenly and poorly placed. It is fight-heavy towards the end so depending on how you started, it may be virtually impossible to finish since low fighting skills plus few opportunities to heal plus numerous heavy-hitting foes is guaranteed to make certain paths through the book unviable without the cheat mode. But it is pretty nice that there essentially three approaches (fighter, medic, engineer) you can start from and three different endings you could reach.The prose... more itself is quite... something. It's mostly juvenile in a nerdy just-hit-puberty way, filled with crude sexual innuendos and trivialised violence. After dying a few times, you'll realise that the stupid choices are usually the better choice, although this is sometimes flipped and the absurd jokes are usually in the poorer choice. While I laughed at some of these jokes and tongue-in-cheek moments early on, they were far too frequent (something like every other sentence) for me to the point they just become predictable cringing and eye-rolling exercises. It doesn't help that the protagonist, i.e. the reader, is an idiotic dork.At least the plot comes with a nice twist and and endings that I find satisfying. Too bad the journey to get there was not fun (and yes, I perservered for a couple of playthroughs just so to get a more complete view of the gamebook).
review 2: I wanted to like this book. I really did. I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure-style books (especially the Goosebumps ones) when I was younger and was happy to stumble onto an adult version of these books. I also thought the concept - adding some light RP elements - was a nice twist that helped add to the adult feel.Unfortunately I think this book had a better premise than execution.First off, let's touch on the RP elements. They're fairly simplistic - you start out with a small pool of HP and a single point in fighting. Throughout the book you're awarded or lose points in fighting, wits and charisma, with these totals dropping to a base value of zero. Which they will, which is frustrating. The battle system is simplistic enough, a pseudo-random number system where you add your skill to the number at the bottle of a page that you flip to. It works, though it isn't necessarily elegant. There is also some item and aspect management. It'd be nice if it were clearer which kind of items were supposed to be equipped and which weren't. At the end of the day though I think the system kind of falls flat for me simply because honestly...it's kind of a pain. The book includes some template in the front to use, but you aren't going to realistically copy those and when I read books, I tend to be curled up in bed, I don't keep pens and paper nearby for tracking. It ends up being more of a burden than a help. And you may just end up ignoring that part of the book.Aside from that - since you can pretty easily ignore those elements if you really want to - the other reason the book fell flat is the writing itself. The premise isn't bad (not great, but not awful) but the writing...meh. There is a bit too much of fourth-wall breaking for my taste and the commentary is annoying more than amusing. And at the end of it, the whole things feels sophomoric, like it was written for frat boys. I am not a frat boy. Enough said.So yeah. I can't really recommend this book. There's an audience out there for it and I'm sure they'll love it, but I stumbled upon this cold, bought it because I was intrigued and then was ultimately disappointed by it. On to the next book. less

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