The Gates of Death by Charlie Higson Review

You are a couple of old school game designers known for all things fantasy like creating Games Workshop. You want to revive your once popular role-playing game/book series, Fighting Fantasy. If you decide to hire the guy who played Swiss Toni on The Fast Show, turn to 143. If you…

Alright, you know what? Reviewing Charlie Higson’s The Gates of Death in the format it was written is not gonna work!

I was a huge fantasy nerd when I was a kid (hard to believe, I know), spending all my pocket money at Games Workshop on figurines, paints, etc. and reading Tolkien, Pratchett, Martin, and also Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy books (though I was more into Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf knockoff series). So I knew I had to pick up The Gates of Death when I heard about it a couple weeks ago – nostalgia, here I come! And was it good? Was it f… (Fast Show reference – two kinds of ‘90s nostalgia for the price of one)!

The fantasy is generic and fairly uninteresting – you have to stop a mysterious plague by bringing a vial to a wizard or something. But then I never read these books for the story, I read them for the gaming aspect. And the novelty of choosing your own adventure is actually still fun, flicking the pages back and forth, rolling dice to work out who wins the fights – until it wasn’t. That’s when I remembered how onerous it gets, reading a book with a pencil, paper and dice on perennial standby, especially when it comes to the fights where you’ve got to work out hit points and all sorts of malarkey, over and over and over and… !

The repetitive nature of it becomes tiresome quite quickly. You will die A LOT so you’ll have to backtrack and restart – if you’re a sucker! I also remembered how I used to play these books, keeping my finger on the previous page to jump back to if the option I chose led to instant death, etc.! And then I cheated so much I lost interest and gave up rather than complete the quest, which is what happened here…

The Gates of Death is a fine choose your own adventure book. If I was still a fantasy fan with oodles of patience and enthusiasm – basically if I was still 12! – I’d love it, and kids were always the main audience for this series anyway. As it is, it made for an entertaining couple hours’ amble down memory lane swiftly followed by a firm resolve to never bother with these kinds of books again (until nostalgia drags me back in another 20 years or so)!