This is one that I owned as a child, and it left a firm impression on my psyche. I had recurring nightmares about goat-headed cultists well into my teenage years, and they still pop up in my dreams on occasion. House of Hell scared me in a way that no other gamebook ever has, but it was so good that I kept going back to it. Sometimes I thought that if I beat it, the nightmares would go away. I didn't beat it for a long, long time.
It's hard to know where to begin when trying to say what's so good about House of Hell, because the temptation is there just to say "all of it" and move on. But I'll start with the writing. Steve Jackson is far from the best prose stylist, and he's often prone to excitable outbursts complete with italics and exclamation points. It works very well here, though, where Jackson can revel in all of the macabre details. The atmosphere is thick with horror, perhaps a little too thick at times: it rarely takes the subtle approach. That's fine though. This is a book where zombies hide behind curtains, headless ghosts fly through the walls, and corpses tumble out of cupboards on top of you. It hits every cliche, but hits them with gusto.
Even better than the writing is the design. A lot of FF adventures are designed like a linear path, with branches that fork off and eventually converge again. House of Hell is far more complex. It's very circuitous, and you can enter different areas from a number of different directions and paths. It can get a little clumsy at times, as the book ushers you past doors you might actually want to explore, but on the whole it work very well, and goes a long way to making the house feel like it's honeycombed with secret doors and passageways. It also introduces a level of complexity to the puzzles that is well above the books prior. Finding the secret door and the password to get the Kris Knife is hard, and Jackson has put in a number of tricks to catch the reader unwares. It's not a book that you can finish on your first go: it takes a lot of tries, and a slow unravelling of the path to victory.
If I have one criticism of the book, it's the use of the Fear statistic. I have no problem with having a Fear score that increases as you explore, and kills you once it gets to a certain point, but there are some ridiculous deaths that can result. Dying because you heard a sinister voice, or saw some curtains open, is more comedic that horrifying. And then there's the fact that you can't win with a score of 7 or 8. It's a good idea, but it's not perfectly executed.
I haven't mentioned the art, but I talked a bit about Tim Sell's work when I covered the magazine version. It's a strange blend of cartoony and horrific, but it works.
On the whole, House of Hell is a stone-cold classic. It might be the best book in the series to this point, and it's absolutely the best one in the series that's not set on Titan. It will be interesting to see if it unseats Citadel of Chaos from the top spot on my STAMINA ratings.
COOL STUFF I MISSED
With only six attempts at this book, I missed a lot. Most of the rooms that I missed were in the cellars. There's a torture chamber with a fun minigame where you have to quickly write down words relating to the house while you're being stretched on the rack, in order to prove that you're a friend of the Master. There's also a prison cell, where a man in grey lays out pretty much everything you need to do to beat the game. A lot of the rooms I didn't find were in the preview version, in vastly different locations. Part of the fun of this book is that, no matter how many times you go through it, there's always something new to discover.
MISTAKES AND RED HERRINGS
I couldn't find any errors. The only item I found that serves no purpose at all is an antique book of medieval portraits, which you can take from the library.
BEST DEATH
This book has 16 instant death paragraphs. This seems a bit low, but there are quite a few of them that you can reach from multiple directions. My favourite is still the one where you try to attack forty cultists, and Steve Jackson tells you straight up that you deserved to die. But I used that one for the magazine version, so here's a solid back-up.
FEAR-RELATED FOLLIES
Because there are so many comical ways of dying, I'm listing them all below. (Note that the first seven or so on the list happen early in the adventure, and aren't likely to kill you.) Behold, the things that can scare you to death inside the House of Drumer:
- Listening to a talking painting
- Seeing the eyes move on a portrait
- Getting nervous after hesitating to ask the earl about his telephone
- Waiting in your bedroom
- Seeing the ghost of a bride
- Standing close to an invisible creature
- Finding some corpses in a cupboard
- Being punched by a zombie who is hiding behind a curtain
- Discovering that a door has locked behind you
- Seeing a decapitated ghost carrying its severed head
- Hearing that ghost tell you you'll be trapped in the house forever
- Seeing some curtains open and close
- Trying to sit on a bed that moves from under you
- Having a chair thrown at you by a poltergeist
- Hearing a polite, sinister voice
- Having said voice mock you for trying to escape through a locked door
- Encountering a ghoul
- Having a corpse fall out of a closet on top of you
- Being ambushed by a white-haired man
- Finding a butchered goat in a crate
- Being swarmed by bats
- Seeing an old man hanging from a tree by a noose
- Being smothered by animated bedsheets
- Seeing a sheet pulled up by a rope
- Being attacked by cupboard-dwelling skeletons
- Seeing a dead lady open her eyes
- Touching a dead old lady
- Opening the front door to see a goat-headed cultist
- Seeing writing mysteriously appear on a piece of paper
- Seeing the writhing souls trapped in the eye on the front of an evil book
- Falling down a trap door
- Looking in a mirror with no reflection
- Hearing some cultists discuss a ritual sacrifice
- Being attacked by a knife-wielding cultist
- Witnessing the HELL DEMON
S.T.A.M.I.N.A. RATING
Story and Setting: The story-telling in this book is more sophisticated than anything seen in the series before, with events progressing in certain areas depending on how far you've made it through the adventure. It all runs on a cliched haunted house/Satanic cult plot, but the directness with which it tackles that stuff is frankly shocking for a children's book. And then there's the house of Drumer, with its circuitous paths and secret passages. It's all good stuff, despite a few bits here and there where the story doesn't quite make sense. Rating: 6 out of 7.
Toughness: This book is very hard, but the majority of that difficulty comes from puzzles, finding the right password and the clues that will get you to the Kris Knife. I'd give this one a perfect score if it was possible to beat the book with a minimum Fear score, but as it is I have to mark it down slightly. Rating: 6 out of 7.
Aesthetics: House of Hell drips with atmosphere, despite a few comical moments of excitable prose from Steve Jackson. (Someone has brought you a bedtime drink!) The art is cartoony yet horrifying, in a weird blend that somehow works in its favour. And it's got a great cover by Ian Miller. Rating: 6 out of 7.
Mechanics: The Fighting Fantasy system is serviceable as usual, and for the most part it's well-used. The Fear score doesn't quite work, though, resulting in some very unsatisfying deaths, and stopping anyone with a score less than 9 from winning. I'm also not the biggest fan of the 50/50 choice at the end when fighting the Earl of Drumer and Franklins. Are there any clues that tell you which is the correct one to attack? That said, I'm going to bump this one up a little for the loads of little design tricks it has. Rating: 5 out of 7.
Innovation and Influence: The Fear score is new, and the horror genre is a first for Fighting Fantasy. Most of the innovation this book shows is in its design, though, with the intertwining pathways and the tricks used to disguise the path to success. Ultimately, those are the things that will carry forward from House of Hell into the rest of the series. Rating: 5 out of 7.
NPCs and Monsters: There are a sizable number of monsters in this book, many of them horror staples: skeletons, zombies, ghosts, a ghoul, a vampire etc. Where the book excels, though is with its human characters and enemies. I think a large part of the horror of House of Hell is that your antagonists are just people. Yes, they're wearing freaky goat masks, but underneath they're regular folks, characters more so than monsters. The book is full of people, some of them on your side but most of them definitely not, and they all have their own little stories. Some of them blend together (there are a few too many former cultists who've been locked up by the Master), but on the whole the book has distinctive characters and memorable encounters. Rating: 6 out of 7.
Amusement: I know I said I was sick of this book, but there's a very short list of gamebooks that I could enjoy playing for as long as I did this one. It's great, and the multitude of pathways through it (albeit only one of which will take you to victory) means that there's always something new to find. It's one of the all-time greats. Rating: 7 out of 7.
House of Hell gets the bonus point for being super-rad and scarring me mentally. The above scores total 42, which doubled gives a final STAMINA Rating of 84. That puts it second on the list, just above The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and six points below The Citadel of Chaos. Sometimes I think Citadel has too high a score, but then I take a look and I can't see which categories I'd mark down. It's going to stay at the top at least until we hit Creature of Havoc, I'd say.
It feels a bit like I've reached the end of an era with House of Hell. Before this, the series was, with one exception, solely populated by the works of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. From this point on, the work of those two men gets a little more scarce, and we start getting a greater variety of authors. I like the variety, but for me there's something special about those first ten books, the first era of FF. House of Hell is an outstanding capstone on that era.
NEXT: I'm going to look through all the backstory peppered throughout this book and try and piece it together. After that, it's on to Warlock #4 and Talisman of Death.
I'm also not the biggest fan of the 50/50 choice at the end when fighting the Earl of Drumer and Franklins. Are there any clues that tell you which is the correct one to attack?
ReplyDeleteNone that I'm aware of, but there is an anti-clue that adds a little weight to my 'Steve wrote the preview first and then expanded it into the full book' theory. The ghost bride explicitly identifies the Earl of Drumer as 'the Master', which is true in the preview, but completely misleading in the book.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Master's identity was specifically changed as a final hurdle for those who had played through the magazine version.
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