Take Up Thy Sword, Warrior. Your Adventure Begins!





Slay The Blood Witches. What a name! Just by the title alone , I could tell I was going to enjoy this. A fun little gamebook that came from Amazon's own print on demand service for about £5. Easily the best fiver I've spent in a long time!









The Gamebook comes as part of the "Opt for the Path" series and while I cant find any other books actually in this series, I truly hope we see more in the future.





The structure of the book is a carbon copy of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series, and while I do like my dice rolls and stat checks, I had a huge amount of fun with this more simplistic approach. No dice are needed, no pencils or notepaper, just the book and a good sense of humor.





The basic story behind "Slay the Blood Witches" is that your village is under threat from 2 evil sorceresses, whether they will start an all out war that will claim the lives of the people you know and love, or if their magical earthquakes will bring the village to ruins. It's up to you to save the townsfolk. (or not, its your choice remember!)





There is a level of inventory management which is cool as it does give some depth to your decisions rather than just a standard Choice A or Choice B, It also allows for some replayability as you wont find everything in one playthrough.





Nathaniel Dale Epperson (What a name!) is a very very talented writer. There is a real sense of dark British humor within these passages that can be really hard to get across to the reader, so well done there Nathaniel! And the level of detail in some of these pages is just astounding, really good at setting the scene.





I found myself laughing out loud multiple times during this adventure at just some of the bizarre things that were happening to my hero. At one point I was off my head on some kind of hallucinogenic LSD drugs, having an absolute blast, only to wake up among a mass grave of fresh corpses. I wont ruin things for anyone because I really think you should all go out and give this adventure a go.





The book is rather short but it's fun enough that you'd want to play through it many times in one sitting. I died countless times due to crazy insta-death scenarios but I never once got annoyed by it, like you do in some FF books. The finale is satisfying and leaves it open to potentially having a sequel (I really hope!)









I highly recommend this gamebook, for the price, the humor, the replayability and because its another great piece of British interactive fiction. Go out and grab this one.



