In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, Icon Books published a new FF gamebook (the first in seven years) by series co-founder Ian Livingstone to mark the occasion. Times being what they are, the book was released with a concurrent gamebook app from Australia’s Tin Man Games, producers of the successful Gamebook Adventures line of apps.
To mark the change in popular sensibilities over the years this has yielded only the second gamebook set on present day Earth (after the similarly horrific House of Hell), with radical streamlining effected on the venerable Fighting Fantasy game mechanisms, with only the STAMINA stat remaining to help our hero overcome hordes (well, over two hundred) zombies in the castle of evil kingpin Gingrich Yurr. (Modern conventional weapons also will lend our hero a hand, should one be able to locate ammunition for them.) The player is the only thing standing in Gingrich’s way of overrunning the planet with his zombie army, naturally.
The app contains everything the gamebook does, plus more—which means a lot of numbered text passages, some illustrated, which must be read and options which must be selected from carefully. In addition to special exclusive bonus passages not present in the book (more grim ways to die, one must imagine), the app also includes achievements, diverse presentation styles, and an alternate illustration set.
