MADAM MORTELL'S HAUNTED HOUSE

Readers escape from a spooky haunted house via a branching narrative.

Readers (addressed in the second person) of this French import are invited into Madam Mortell’s haunted mansion, but—bwahahahaha! It’s a trap. There’s any number of gruesome monsters in the house, but readers can escape if they follow the Rules of the Game. There are choices to be made, puzzles to be solved, and inventory to be acquired. The book encourages readers to make notes in the solving tools provided in the backmatter. Ghoulish set dressing (including “hairy tarantulas climbing the drapes, rats running along the walls, black cats clawing on the moth-eaten velour curtains”) is sure to entertain, which is more, alas, than can be said for the puzzles. A confusing layout for the choices makes it easy to accidentally discover correct answers, and not all puzzles are logically solvable or accurately clued. Moreover, it’s possible to enter story branches that can’t be exited. Adapting the tradition of gamebooks to the contemporary interest in escape rooms is a clever conceit despite the broken implementation. Hopefully there’ll be future volumes that apply lessons learned from decades of successful versions from the likes of Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy. Humanoid monsters are White, and the two kid characters depicted in one of the full-color illustrations as reader stand-ins have pale skin and short, red hair and brown skin and long, brown hair.

Nifty idea; flawed execution.