Thrave Review

It's the late eighties and early-to-mid nineties, and adventure gamebooks are huge in the United Kingdom, with the popularity of Fighting Fantasy having prompted every other publisher going to jump on the bandwagon. One of the more prolific gamebook authors who never wrote for FF is one Stephen Thraves, and I am truly grateful for his name providing the pun in the title of this article. But what about his gamebooks?

Several of Mr Thraves' series were based on licensed properties, including ranges based on The Famous Five, Biggles and Asterix. Most gamebooks are played with nothing more than two dice and a pencil, but Thraves, to his credit, aimed higher than that, and many of his books included special 'feelies' required to play. For example, his Famous Five books came with a special 'Famous Five die' with the characters' faces, used to decide which of the five characters would volunteer for something in the course of the game, 'picnic cards' to keep track of provisions, a map, a measuring device actually used to measure things in the illustrations, and decoding devices. (The ever excellent Demian's Gamebook Webpage includes scans of the items that came with the first game, which I shall link to here and here as they get the idea across rather better than my descriptions.) These books are the scourge of many a gamebook collector, as it is virtually impossible to find copies that still have all - or any - of their equipment attached. (Before you ask, the sixth side of the Famous Five die was the 'mystery square' which would result in a wildcard character being used instead of one of the Five.)

NB: Thraves' Famous Five books are not to be confused with the earlier The Famous Five and You series, which adapted several of the books by Blyton into gamebooks... appallingly badly, as the only interactive element was the reader occasionally being asked if they could remember what happened in the original book. Similarly, Thraves' Asterix gamebooks are not to be confused with the Alea Jacta Est series, which were originally published in French and were rather good.

Perhaps as a response to the overly fiddly nature of these books, Thraves came up with another series, one of the entries in which is pictured at the top of this article - Compact Adventure Gamebooks. These books were 'fun-sized', as I believe parlance goes, and didn't require dice (they were designed to be played on car journeys and the like), but Thraves was still keen to ensure an element of interactivity beyond just going from section to section.

Each Compact Adventure Gamebook came with score cards, with 40 of the things printed on the inside covers. (You can see the ones for the first one, Haunted Island, on Demian's Gamebook Webpage here.) Basically, each book had three different statistics - Life, Things to Collect, and Accessories. However, depending on the scenario, each of those statistics would be called something different. For example, in Haunted Island, the 'life' statistic refers to how many times you can see a ghost before you die of fright, but in Assignment Loch Ness (where you play a photographer for a newspaper trying to get cast-iron proof that the Loch Ness Monster exists) it refers to how many photographs you have left on your only roll of film (all your spare cameras and film having been stolen by rival reporters working for another newspaper). Finally, the accessories were printed on flaps on the inside cover of the book, and if you found those items in the game then you were allowed to refer to them. These would nearly always be a map, plus two lists of information. For example, in Assignment Loch Ness one of the two accessories was a guide to local nature walks, telling you if the walk you were about to go on had many or few views of the loch, was long or short, or steep or gentle; and the other was a newspaper article with pictures of people who'd claimed to have recently seen the Loch Ness Monster, and you had to match the pictures up to the physical descriptions given in the book.

Unfortunately, whilst a certain amount of creativity undoubtedly went into this part of the books (and this is something that affects his 'bigger' books too, but they can maybe hide it slightly better because of the 'feelies'), the gameplay itself is where they fall down, because these books are painfully formulaic. Many of them have great premises - apart from Assignment Loch Ness, another one I really like is Footsteps in the Fog, where you play the Watson to Sherlock Holmes' less successful downstairs neighbour - but in terms of choices the player makes, they come down to every few sections, you have to make a decision, and that decision is informed by one of the three accessories. For example, in Footsteps, you occasionally have to get a hansom cab driver to take you to a location, but for some reason every single time you do this the driver has no idea where the place you want to go is, and you need the map to tell you which direction it's in. If you don't have the map, then it's down to guesswork.

(Footsteps also features what is unquestionably the stupidest 'life' mechanic not just in this series, but any gamebook. Every so often if you make the wrong choice, the villain of the piece will attempt to assassinate you by firing a poisoned dart from his specially modified walking stick, and the first three will always be near-misses, irrespective of the circumstances, and only the fourth one will actually hit you, killing you instantly. You'd think if he was such a bad shot he might try a different approach.)

And then there's Things to Collect. Every book requires you to collect a certain number of things, and you need to collect the maximum number of things to win. In Secret Agent A.C.E., you need to find and destroy the six bottles of the evil villain's insanity-inducing formula. Each bottle is kept in a special vault with a password. As luck would have it, every time you reach one of these vaults you happen to overhear a guard giving information about the password which narrows it down to one of four possibilities - but which of those four it is is total guesswork! To make matters worse, at the end of the adventure you are asked if you successfully found all of the golden goblets, or took all the pictures of the Loch Ness Monster, or found all the pieces of evidence implicating the murderer - but there's no section to turn to if you did, the final section just tells you you've only really won if you managed to catch 'em all.

One or two of the later books in the series try and break out of this pattern - Cup Heroes, which wasn't actually written by Thraves at all, actually involves a certain degree of logic and replicates football quite well using a code system (you're presented with three every time the opposing team tries to score a goal), and Murder in the Dark offers several possible solutions to a murder mystery, with the solution actually determined by the score cards - but generally they're not very interesting, and I'm not convinced the flaws I've described here are entirely down to constraints in the format. However, these books probably did their job in distracting many a child whose parents' car was gridlocked in Bank Holiday traffic, so I'm reluctant to come down on them too harshly (it is worth mentioning they do have rather good production values, with nice illustrations - particularly the full-colour ones for the accessories.) Nevertheless, Stephen Thraves clearly had a lot of ambition in game design, and yet none of his books really come close to matching it in terms of gameplay.

Conclusion: Only recommended for children, and even then not if you're especially keen on the children in question.