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Category: Adventure game
Developer: Big Blue Bubble
Requirements: iPhone 3.0 software
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 44.9 MB
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Price: $2.99

If you don’t know what a Choose Your Own Adventure book is, you’re pretty much dead to me. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston graphed more of a role-playing game onto the genre, adding stats, combat and dice, while retaining the “make a choice and turn to this page” mechanic.

And now the books by Jackson & Livingstone have come to the iPhone: literally; the same text, the same choices and art. In Deathtrap Dungeon, you take on the role of an adventurer trying to make your way through a, well, dungeon filled with deathtraps. You’ll explore and fight your way through the caverns, finding monsters, treasure, and puzzles. Your skill, stamina (health), and luck will go up and down (mostly down) depending on the choices you make and how well you do in combat.

The app takes advantage of advances in technology; dice rolls are built into the game (you can either shake your iPhone or tap to roll), and it keeps track of the choices you’ve made—if you drank the mysterious potion earlier in the game, it might open up a choice later on. The game remembers even if you don’t. Every once in a while you’ll run into artwork. Clicking on it zooms it so you can enjoy the detail.

In terms of replayability, the instructions inform you that there is “one true path” through the dungeon, which means you’ll have to go through it a few times to find all the items you’ll need to make it through. After one successful run, I ran smack-dab into a locked door—and since I hadn’t found the key I got slaughtered every time. I’ll need to backtrack, or more like restart the whole thing, to find it. The great thing is that it features the ability to go back, one choice at a time. So, if your mistake leads to a grisly death, you can quickly backtrack (just like in the books).

Couple of problems with the games. First off, it crashes somewhat frequently, but after restarting it, the “continue” function always picked up right where I left off. The stranger problem is with music. If you’re listening to music on your iPhone/iPod touch, starting FF:DD will kill it so you can listen to the short opening theme. But in the game settings, you can set a playlist of your iTunes music to listen to while you play the game. This, however, got buggy later in the game, with the music skipping and repeating. I eventually turned it off.

Despite the bugs, though, Fighting Fantasy: Deathtrap Dungeon is an engaging piece of fantasy, even if you’re not a nostalgia junkie for the 80s.  The combination of finding the “right” way to run the dungeon and the dice rolls to randomize combat make it addictive.