The Forest of Doom was developed and published by Penguin Books in 1984 for the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum. It is the second Fighting Fantasy gamebook that was adapted for the home computer. The Citadel of Chaos was the first adaptation. I found the story in The Citadel of Chaos to be quite interesting and the different encounters challenging. I remember that there were a myriad number of ways you could progress through the game and my experience was a relatively positive one.
I didn’t have such a high opinion of this second offering. I never read either of the Fighting Fantasy books that were adapted, so I can’t compare the books to the games and comment on that aspect, but I feel that in The Forest of Doom the player loses a lot of flexibility and there is something lost in the translation. While I enjoyed the writing of some of the planned encounters, I felt like I was bereft of any decision making and felt more than a little railroaded.
You begin the game rolling for skill, stamina, and luck characteristics much like in the first game. Your attribute scores seemed crucial in the first game, and you were allowed to pick from a selection of spells. Choosing the right spell list made the difference in winning or losing the game. Rather than choosing spells, Forest of Doom has you go shopping for magic items in the beginning of the game. Several of the items are absolutely necessary in order for you to be able to finish the game. If you do not choose correctly, you will discover much later that you are unable to win the game and will have to basically go back to the beginning.
What I found frustrating is that when you reach an encounter area, the game takes any decision making out of your hands. Instead of you having to determine which item might be best suited to solving your problem, if the game recognizes that you’re merely carrying the item, it has you press a key and then you read in a new text blurb how you’ve overcome the problem. This happened with almost every encounter, and I felt like I was merely along for the ride.
There were five or six combat encounters where dice are rolled to determine the outcome. This time around however the combat felt like window dressing. I won all of the encounters quite effortlessly and never really felt like I was in any danger. There were a couple of areas in the game where my health was fully restored as well.
In The Citadel of Chaos, I felt like my choices mattered and I often would not survive many of the combat encounters. In this second offering I felt like I was in a Visual Novel.
The map only allows you to move forward. You can never move south, nor can you backtrack in the game which only reinforced my feelings of being railroaded.
The ultimate goal of the game is to locate four different talismans and return them to the dwarves of Stonebridge. Once you do so you are rewarded with a gold winged helmet and a silver box of jewels as depicted above. If you enjoy interactive fiction the story and encounters are entertaining. I played the game on a C64 emulator, and the game took me three hours to beat. I strongly suggest pressing F7 for Fast Text Mode otherwise the game prints each description one painstakingly slow line at a time. It is much like watching an old dot matrix printer go to work. I enjoyed The Citadel of Chaos much more than this second offering.
Next up on the docket is Fortress of the Witch King.
Until next time…