We covered the fact that several of the later adventures in the GrailQuest suffered from major playability issues and a serious lack of proofreading in some of the very earliest Broken Gamebooks articles. But let's go back to the fourth book in the series now, to look at an interesting, albeit small, design flaw.
Before we get started, I don't think I've ever actually mentioned the premise of the series before now, and it would be useful to cover it here if you haven't read the books. The gamebook is actually a spellbook, by which means the reader's mind is captured by Merlin to inhabit the body of the player character, Pip, who is surely one of the ultimate examples of a Featureless Protagonist - the text is careful to avoid ever specifying Pip's gender, and whenever Pip is illustrated the picture somehow finds some way to avoid showing Pip's face, usually by simply not showing them from the neck up, but on other occasions by having Pip distorted or out of sight in some way. As befits the series' humorous tone, later volumes deliberately turn this into a running joke, perhaps best exemplified by Realm of Chaos, which features a full-page illustration of Pip's head... as it graphically explodes.
Anyway, in Voyage of Terror, Merlin has decided to summon the reader to deal with a Saxon invasion of Avalon which King Arthur can't deal with because Excalibur has been stolen, but midway through the spell someone drops a bucket on his head, meaning things go catastrophically wrong and the player ends up in Ancient Greece instead, trying to find a way back to Avalon whilst bereft of the usual weapons, special equipment and spells that are usually available to you. Effectively the entire book starts out as a No-Gear Level. As was usual for many volumes in the series, rather than making a choice at the end of each numbered section, a lot of the gameplay was done via maps, like the boat you start out in:
The boat belongs to Jason and the Argonauts, except it's been taken over by pirates. Once you've rescued them and taken the ship back, you can travel around some islands:
The object of the game is to collect ten tiny golden keys from around the islands, which eventually provide the way back to Avalon to take on the Saxon invasion. These keys will remain in your inventory even in the event that you get killed, and obviously you should not trade them for anything, use them for bribery, or anything else that could cause you to lose them. Except only one of the keys - the one you find on Demondim Isle by encountering the Poetic Fiend - explains this. So, logically, that should be the first key you find, and indeed the section in which you find said key does seem to be written with the expectation that you would. Except you don't have to. You can find the keys in just about any order you please. Indeed, it is fairly unlikely that the reader will visit Demondim Isle first, as it is tricky to get to; in order to reach it, you either have to make a dice roll which has a 33% chance of killing you instantly, or fight one of the nastiest monsters in the book (80 LIFE POINTS, strikes on a roll of 6 or better, +4 damage and you cannot try for a Friendly Reaction or Bribery).
This isn't really something that breaks the game - it is more of a minor oversight. After all, even if you don't go to Demondim Isle first, you will probably work out those little golden keys are important once you've got three or four of them. The worst thing that can happen from a game point of view is probably that you can not realise that you keep the keys even if you die and waste some time revisiting previous areas after you've been killed; from a narrative point of view, though, it is important to find Demondim Isle to actually find out what the book's plot is beyond wandering around, which is not dissimilar - albeit a far less serious issue - to the way you can accidentally render Realm of Chaos a load of nonsensical gibberish by accidentally never encountering a plot-relevant character.
But what is curious about it is that the first area - the boat you first appear on - does take into account that you might visit the sections in any old order, and is careful to avoid assuming you've visited any other sections first. So why does that change with the second map, even if it's only that one encounter really affecting things?
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