Temple of the Spider God is a gamebook published as an iOS universal app, seventh in the Gamebook Adventures series by Tin Man Games. They are setting a new trend of publishing gamebooks solely as digital books, rather than as digital reprints of paper gamebooks. Designer and author Jonathan Green, while new to the Gamebook Adventures series, has authored several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Temple of the Spider God (TOTSG) centers around discovering the source of parasitic mind control spiders that threaten to invade land of Orlandes. You battle pirates, sea monsters, spiders, and other fiends in the search for the source of evil. The gamebook uses a light RPG system similar in complexity to the Lone Wolf series. Thus you have stats like hit points, combat strength, and an inventory system. Furthermore the system uses standard six-sided dice for random number generation.
I have mixed feeling about TOTSG because the story is top notch, unpredictable, and has a good arcs of tension -- and yet the game design falls short. Because the random number generation does not use any sort of averaging or a curve, chaos is rampant in gameplay. In the first scene of the game, you battle two assassins and unless you roll well, you will not survive. In my game I repeated the first scene five times before I was able to defeat the assassins. Dying five times in the first five minutes of a game is frustrating. Since the plot is combat heavy and ambushes are common, one cannot plan or make wise choices to avoid combat and thus dying is common.
What makes the game playable are plentiful save points (Bookmarks). Since you can save right before battle, you can replay to get the result that you are looking for. The story is compelling and the full color illustrations add to the richness of the story. The designer does an excellent job of making you feel like a swashbuckling adventurer in a grand heroic quest. TOTSG is a fun adventure, just be ready for some grinding.
If your critiquing that it
If your critiquing that it doesn't rig it that the player wins all the time, why not critique it for having combat at all? "There was a fight, you won!"?
No, I know what he's saying.
No, I know what he's saying. This is a recurrent problem with a lot of gamebooks, to the point that a lot of players will just do exactly as you suggest and turn to the "win" page. The good thing about playing against an inanimate object is that it doesn't complain when you cheat. ~_^
The issue is that the standard gamebook model is totally luck-dependent. Sohn talked about a curve, which is uncommon for gamebooks, who prefer simple mechanics. I think Lone Wolf accomplished something like it by means of a large table. It made your stats matter and combat fairly simple, but it was also annoying for first timers.
A bigger problem with the format, IMHO, is the lack of real decisions to make in combat. A lot of gamebooks have this problem, actually: you just hack away until someone's dead.
But the rennaisance is young still -- compare the early days of the Interactive Fiction Scene to modern IF -- so I think we'll have innovators willing to challenge these problems.
(BTW, the game's page trips a malware alert in Chrome. Got a clean link, by any chance?)
I think you should ask
I think you should ask yourself if you actually have any interest in losing as well as in winning (ie, not just an interest in winning). If you don't, this process of bell curves or combat options wont suffice - every losing situation will be seen as an error and 'patched' until you get a system that grants a 100% win all the time. Probably wrapped in a baroquely complicated system which will enable an illusion of being able to lose.
Luck in games
There's a great video that I think is relevant to discussion here - Richard Garfield on luck in games. He also defines a term that I think Callan might appreciate: "orthogame".
Losing should be fun
I think you should ask yourself if you actually have any interest in losing as well as in winning
Actually no, I shouldn't- the game designer should. Or at any rate he might want to. Some games are designed with gainful losing in mind:
You'll lose nethack a million times before you grokk it correctly.
Your best Dwarf Fortress anecdotes will be about how everything went terribly wrong and you "accdientaly" flooded the whole complex with magma.
Hell, the whole point of Fiasco is that all your plans have gone belly-up and if at least half of your party doesn't end up dead physically or emotionally, you need a new GM.
A special honorary mention goes to the Sierra adventure game tradition, where so much a picking your nose or crossing the street would get you killed for a cheap laugh. (though it's otherwise in the second category)
Other games, however, are focused on entirely on success. Either by pretending failure isn't an option at all, or by turning it into an instant game-over. The only reason to be interested in losing in such a game is either:
(a)it's a puzzle (you need to figure out how to use your resources in the most efficient manner in the given situation)
(b)masochism.
(also: (c)padding the game's length by introducing a random factor into a situation where the player is not interested in a loss, essentially tapping into the brain's gambling circuitry, with player's time being the bet and continuation of the story being the payout.)
From the masochism reference
From the masochism reference it sounds like you don't even consider gamist play to win as a possibility, unless it comes down to an explicit puzzle? And indeed, maybe the author just intended some sort of genre emulation, but I find your dismissal of any other possibility unconvincing.
I think the reviewer and yourselves are evaluating this by your own standards - you haven't asked the author if they were shooting for what your talking about. So asking yourself why you have any chance of failure when you don't like it is a question for you.
interest
Well, I have some interest in losing, if it's "Here's a choice -- here's another choice -- here's another choice -- if you made bad choices your chance of losing is much higher!"
I don't have much interest in "Page 1: Assassins attack you! Roll 1d6. If you rolled a 1-5, turn to page 3. If you rolled a 6, turn to page 4. I Page 3: You won! Relevant plot stuff continues. Page 4: You died!"
It sounds like Sebastian's complaint was that the combat is more of the second kind -- you can't avoid battles, you can't make choices in battles to tilt the RNG in your favor. Do you think that that can be a good model?
He mentioned "Because the
He mentioned "Because the random number generation does not use any sort of averaging or a curve, chaos is rampant in gameplay."
The focus seemed to be on sticking with a random system but as if an average or curve (bell curve, I'm assuming) will solve it. It wont, I'm saying. Combat built on choice (or combat perhaps built on some sort of memory game (indeed some titles used that for their magic system, IIRC)) with little to no random element is another direction entirely (which I think works), which I'm not sure was mentioned. But a bell curve just means the thing that sucks happens less often - it doesn't get rid of that suck.
Try again, fail again, fail better
it sounds like you don't even consider gamist play to win as a possibility, unless it comes down to an explicit puzzle
First of all, I meant more of an implied puzzle, e.g. You're playing a mission of Red Alert and get overrun by your enemy, you then analyze your mistakes and decide to kill that one enemy base instead of overextending your forces to take that one oil field, which leads to you losing again, but now much further down the mission.
Second, I missed a whole other type of interest in losing, and that's developing some other skill (like hand-eye coordination). You can be Hawking and sill not be able to beat meatboy on easy for 20 hours straight... and you'd still be interested (or so they say, I rage-quit after 19 and never looked back).
Games like this one, on the other hand, do not provide an opportunity to either update your skills or your strategy- it's just luck.