Der Tempel der 1000 Gefahren

Thick smoke lies over the street. Screams become loud. You make out the outline of people running toward the vehicle. You don't believe your eyes: The people are wearing Mayan clothes and weapons! One of them, a tall man with muscular arms, grabs the professor at the collar and tries to drag him out of the jeep. Chavéz thrashes around. Without much thinking, you rush to help the professor and punch the attacker.

(Quote translated from German.)

When I was a kid, I used to be obsessed with “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and this 1000 Gefahren (transl.: 1000 Dangers) series specifically. I had a bunch of these growing up and some of them still sit on my dusty shelf now. I have many fond memories with them and this one, in particular, had a special standing for me because it seemed so incredibly hard. I remember struggling to find a positive, satisfying ending in this one all the time and I always meant to pick it up again to give it a thorough look-through as an adult now. Revisiting this book now was definitely interesting.

First of all, it definitely struck me as true that this book is full of unsatisfying and sudden endings. I can't say if that's actually something that's more prominent in this one over other books of the series, but I can say that it took a while for me to even set foot in a Maya temple at all. There are plenty of endings that occur before you even reach one. Some of these could even be considered happy endings where you end up remotely uncovering a mystery of an expedition team that disappeared and catch some gangsters. But if your book is literally called Temple of 1000 Dangers you better get to read about a temple too. Everything else is just an unsatisfying ending before the story even really began.
I eventually did find the couple of paths that do let you explore this secret Mayan temple and I found at least three endings that I would actually call satisfying. As in, it's a positive ending that actually resulted from an adventure inside a Mayan temple.
I've probably read through every (or almost every) path while sitting down with it for about 90 minutes. I might be missing a few pages but I generally explored every off-shoot that I came across. Some of the possible stories are pretty decent, but a lot of them are very brief and flimsy. But there are some neat encounters with Mayan deities and the such, although I have no idea if any of that is accurate to their actual culture and of course, it's all written in very flat Middle-Grade prose.
It was interesting though to recognize the “mechanics” of the book a bit more now as an adult, seeing where the threads depart and come across each other. Though one of my favorite moments was when you encounter a dangerous-looking dog and are given two options for how to deal with it, both of which lead straight into endings. One where you get mauled by the dog and one where you pet the good doggo. Neither of which includes a Mayan temple.
There are also some neat illustrations in here that I completely forgot about. Some of it is surprisingly gnarly too.

It definitely did not have the same charm for me as it did when I was a kid, but I don't think this one was ever one of my favorites. It mostly just struck me as memorable for being oddly difficult, which has also been more or less a mystery that has been alleviated now through this revisiting.
I'm very curious though to revisit some of my actual childhood favorites from this series and see if they have more captivating stories.