Trial of the Clone

Ok, so I didn't know about the author before I got this off the App store at a discounted price. Would've skipped it had I known. The premise sounded interesting so I took the bait.

I'll start with the mechanics. The system is pretty simple and for the most part works. It's just that the challenges are pretty unevenly and poorly placed. It is fight-heavy towards the end so depending on how you started, it may be virtually impossible to finish since low fighting skills plus few opportunities to heal plus numerous heavy-hitting foes is guaranteed to make certain paths through the book unviable without the cheat mode. But it is pretty nice that there essentially three approaches (fighter, medic, engineer) you can start from and three different endings you could reach.

The prose itself is quite... something. It's mostly juvenile in a nerdy just-hit-puberty way, filled with crude sexual innuendos and trivialised violence. After dying a few times, you'll realise that the stupid choices are usually the better choice, although this is sometimes flipped and the absurd jokes are usually in the poorer choice. While I laughed at some of these jokes and tongue-in-cheek moments early on, they were far too frequent (something like every other sentence) for me to the point they just become predictable cringing and eye-rolling exercises. It doesn't help that the protagonist, i.e. the reader, is an idiotic dork.

At least the plot comes with a nice twist and and endings that I find satisfying. Too bad the journey to get there was not fun (and yes, I perservered for a couple of playthroughs just so to get a more complete view of the gamebook).