vintagerpg:

New year, new week of gamebooks, mostly! Let us begin with Steve Jackson’s House of Hell (1984) AKA Fighting Fantasy Gamebook 10. Many consider this one of the best in the series and I tend to agree, even though I kind of forget about it when FF faves come up in conversation. Which is crazy, because look at that cover by Ian Miller! How do I forget that exists? What a stupid brain this is sometimes.

My intellectual failings aside, House of Hell is kind of an FF outlier. For one, it’s set in the modern era (and possibly the only FF that does this). For two, there is a Fear mechanic, in which you accumulate points as you encounter scary things and if you hit a certain threshold, you drop dead — this is unique among all the books in the series. For three, you talk quite a lot and fight not very much (and when you do, you’re bad at it because you’re a normie and probably unarmed). Talking to characters who are clearly villains who’d like you dead is actually necessary for your survival and success. And there isn’t really an optimal path through the book. Rather, multiple deaths and playthroughs will inform you of aspects of a greater mystery to solve as you seek to escape the house. And it is extremely hard. Puzzle elements, including many secret passages (I kind of love and hate these, as they make the book very difficult), complicate navigation. I only wound up getting somewhere close to the ideal ending when I started to get very, very frustrated with the construction of the book, and because of that I am still not entirely sure I solved it. That was a couple years back, and I still don’t have the energy to give it another crack.

And that, too, speaks to its enduring appeal. I still think about it, and will probably play it again some day to see what, if anything I’ve missed. Precious few gamebooks keep calling me back like that.

It helps, too, that it’s genuinely spooky in parts! Tim Sell’s illustrations are gruesome in a camp sort of way, full of blood and screaming faces and Satanists (and certain Hammer mainstays). The book was released in the US as House of Hades, because we’re a big bunch of babies, I guess. On the other hand, my UK edition lacks the “scandalous” human sacrifice illustration, so I guess we’re all babies in the end.