Trail of Fear

I have rhapsodised at some length about the superhero-themed Fighting Fantasy book, Appointment with F.E.A.R., on several previous occasions: a loving homage to superhero comics, down to the cover art provided by 2000 AD artist Brian Bolland, the book gives you the choice of four superpowers, namely Super Strength, Psi-Powers, Enhanced Technological Skill and Energy Blast.

The adventure will play out completely differently depending on which superpower you choose, for on each possible playthrough, the clues you need to locate the titular meeting of the Federation of Euro-American Rebels will reside with different supervillains, and the location itself will also be totally different, leading to four distinct endgames.

I've tried to reverse-engineer this enormously complex book without melting my brain, producing something totally incoherent, or just typing out the solution reference-by-reference. And I'm pretty pleased with the solution I've come up with. (Hopefully it leaves a decent amount of mystery, but if you have any ambitions of beating Appointment with F.E.A.R. unaided, it's probably best to stop reading now.)

You may be surprised to learn this is the first time I've ever used a spreadsheet for a post on adventure gamebooks, but here are all the possible encounters, with the ones you need to complete in order to find all the clues for each version highlighted in green:

The one thing that is common to all playthroughs is having to get the Circuit Jammer, without which the boss battle against the Titanium Cyborg is unwinnable; it resides with Sidney Knox on the Psi-Powers and E.T.S. paths, and as a reward for stopping the android on Super Strength and Energy Blast. The pickpocket has three different items on him, but you only have time to take one, and need to choose a different item depending on if you have Super Strength or E.T.S.

You will note that there are some supervillains or other incidents you shouldn't encounter in any playthrough, irrespective of which superpower you have. The biggest of these is, of course, the assassination of the President on the final day before the endgame. This is a pretty well-seeded subplot, with multiple opportunities to learn of the rumours that there will be an attempt on the President's life when he drives through Titan City (the entire scenario being an obvious reference to the assassination of JFK) and chances to find out the details of the plot from multiple members of the city's criminal underworld.

On the Super Strength and Energy Blast paths, you can save the President's life without missing any of the clues and gain the large extra number of Hero Points without penalty (which are used to measure how, er, heroic you've been on this playthrough, but have no impact on gameplay).

On the Psi-Powers path, you can't capture the Poisoner and get his clue as well as save the President's life. However, the Poisoner's clue is that the location of the meeting is known by a man with a gold watch -- who you needed to meet back on day 1, during the argument in the street, and learn from your power that he was fixating on a pawnbroker's shop. These clues are clearly meant to be used together, but just one would be necessary to beat the endgame without drifting into cheating or even fudging.

And on the E.T.S. path, saving the President means forgoing the clue from the encounter with the Macro Brain -- who tells you the meeting is due to take place in a Chinese laundry. Without this clue, you are forced to make a guess between two buildings at the relevant point in the endgame, but it is still solvable -- most of the other parts of the various different endgames involve using numbers such as streets, avenues, or times of day to figure out the number of a secret section not directly given as an option in the text.

It certainly feels deliberate that Jackson wanted to give the player the opportunity to solve the puzzle and save the President's life (which is also accomplished by accessing a hidden reference you can only get to if you meet someone who knows how the plot will be carried out), even if it wasn't necessary to solve the game. But is this sidetrack intended just as a red herring? A bonus mission? A distraction to people trying to reverse-engineer the book, or would-be cheaters? Or all of the above?