House of Hellish Difficulty

1984's House of Hell, then. An early entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, penned by the range's co-creator Steve Jackson, the only book in the series to feature a contemporary setting (a title it would hold until 2012, when Ian Livingstone's Blood of the Zombies was unleashed upon the world), and surely responsible for many a nightmare given to unsuspecting young children who read it. It was also easily the hardest book in the series up to that point, and remains well-known for its high difficulty level.

Its difficulty level stems from how puzzle-orientated it is. There are a large number of areas which are dead ends or have multiple long paths which all lead to death, including one seemingly important quest which is actually just a red herring. The whole house is effectively a giant maze, expanding on the smaller one seen in Jackson's half of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

But the problem - or my problem, or some peoples' problem - is that it's probably too difficult. I've seen many reports of readers in the eighties who were only able to solve it by completely reverse-engineering the book... and, to be blunt, the plot is pretty thin, serving mostly as a homage to every horror film ever made. Jackson found a better balance with his later Appointment with F.E.A.R. and Creature of Havoc, which both feature a highly developed backstory and immersive plot alongside their insanely difficult puzzles. House of Hell isn't really a story, just one giant puzzle.

But back to the difficulty. Put simply, if you go to even one reference that's not part of the solution, then the game becomes unwinnable - winning requires an exact sequence of moves to be done in a very specific order. The correct path requires finding the password to a secret door, and there's a red herring on the true solution. This is the first book in the main series to use Jackson's patented special reference modifiers to allow the reader to take an option not explicitly given by the text (i.e. deduct 10 from the number of the paragraph you're currently on and turn to that number to look for a secret door) - this is probably what caused so much confusion back in the eighties and helped to give the book a lot of its reputation, as it was not a tactic many of the readers would have thought of. (Interestingly, the book's contemporary setting means that it often punishes the player for acting as if they're still in a swords-and-sorcery fantasy, particularly if you try to help any of the other people being kept prisoner in the house - I wonder if that might also have confused people playing it when it was first released, given what a huge departure it was?)

Once you've worked out the hidden references, then you've cracked the book's secret and it does become a little easier knowing that. Even so, the book requires you to carefully map it out and keep track of where you went wrong before (because you simply won't make it through the first few times round), and you will probably generate more careful note-taking playing it than any other book in the series.

The book's horror content caused some controversy, with this picture generating complaints; it was removed from later printings, including Wizard Books' noughties reissue.

It also includes an infamous problem with its special mechanic, Fear Points. In an apparent homage to the Jump Scares so beloved by many of the horror movies the book references, if you get scared you get Fear Points. You have a predetermined maximum of how much Fear you can take, calculated by rolling one die and adding 6. Reach that limit, and your character dies of fright! The problem is that the lowest possible Fear score is 7, and the one true way through the book requires you to pick up 8 Fear points. (Other sources say it's 7, and account for this by saying you need to exceed your Fear score to die of fright, but my solution, and that of others, comes out at 8.)

Despite its flaws, I like House of Hell, and it represents a significant leap forward in the Fighting Fantasy range's ambition; we might not have gotten some of the other groundbreaking entries in the series without this one. It unquestionably deserves the reputation it's had for the last 34 years.