Howl of Appreciation

For the second in my occasional Say Something Nice About A Gamebook series, I've gone to 2007. Wizard Books had relaunched the Fighting Fantasy series about five years ago, and Howl of the Werewolf by Jonathan Green was the twenty-ninth and final title in the first series of reissues. It was only the third completely original title they'd published, and it was a revelation.

The Fighting Fantasy range has now had three different relaunches for the 21st century, and each one has focused on updating the art and design. I would suggest that Mr Green's work shows they're doing it wrong. Because, you see, many FF books are fairly linear, and only feature 'one true way' through the adventure. Howl of the Werewolf is groundbreaking: there are a huge number of entirely optional sidequests and locations to visit, with different ways of fighting the book's endgame depending on which sidequests you've tackled and what you've managed to collect. I think it is possible to play through this book at least three times without going to the same reference (apart from the first one) twice. It's about as close as a single gamebook will ever get to being a Wide Open Sandbox. I mentioned Appointment with F.E.A.R. last time, and this feels like it massively builds and expands on that... a mere two decades after F.E.A.R. was first published.

Green clearly knew he was onto a winner, because two years later Wizard relaunched their relaunch, and he contributed two more adventures to the second series that are very much in the same mould, Stormslayer and Night of the Necromancer. Green also deserves massive plaudits for coming up with really unusual adventures that are well beyond the standard FF fare: a book where the player character must seek a cure for lycanthropy seems like an idea that, in retrospect, it's amazing they've never done before, given werewolves crop up so frequently and there have been minor sidequests in previous books dealing with the adventurer being infected. A book where the player character is dead to begin with and must solve the mystery of their own murder? Perhaps slightly less obvious.

Now, books like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain quite rightly have an enormous amount of affection, and I still think they hold up pretty well today. But what we have here is a quite radically different proposition: an FF book with so much replay value it can more than hold its own with the console generation. It's hard not to shake off the feeling that this is the sort of thing the 21st century relaunch should have been doing from the start, rather than waiting three years to even publish a brand new adventure. But we did get books like Howl of the Werewolf, and for that we should be very grateful.