“You refuse Boris’s offer of soup as politely as you can.”

Which Way Books were a companion series to CYOA, in a way. Maybe less a companion series, and more like a weird little cousin. You know, the cousin that played with fireworks and never seemed to blink when he spoke to you.

In fact, Sugarcane Island, one of the proto-CYOA adventures, was included in the series.

Castle of No Return very, very briskly chronicles your discovery of a random castle in the woods behind your house, which has somehow gone undiscovered until now despite being on the outskirts of your neighborhood. Weirdness abound from the moment you set foot on the premises: seas of wriggly rats, psychokinetic mad scientists who specialize in transforming things into other things, and even ghostly ladies who love Monopoly. The main plot arc with Boris is the closest we get to a proper storyline in this. The other choices lead to a variety of random spooks and scares like a haunted house attraction.

It’s all very quaint, and probably moody for a seven-year-old, maybe. At age ten I would’ve torn through this story and gotten every ending in a half hour. As an adult, you’ll manage it in even less time than that.

This is largely due to the overly-basic writing style. Everything is summarized in the simplest way possible, with little to no attempts at immersion or atmosphere. Granted, there’s one moment that’s kind of spooky where I was exploring the exterior of the castle, and a flash of lightning revealed I was standing in the middle of a graveyard. But even that is presented more like a treatment than a fleshed-out narrative.

And it’s really weird how little space is used on the pages, like they didn’t get all the artwork finished in time and had to let some chapters go without. The author could have used this space to significantly flesh out every sequence and make the book more engaging.

The endings where you escape the castle, or otherwise save the day, are the worst examples of this. In an effort to ensure every chapter consists of a single page, most of the good endings are along the lines of, “But then everything was fine, and you are happy and safe. You’re a hero!” They could just as well have left it at, “You won, the end.” The gamebook equivalent to a crappy NES game “CONGRATULATIONS!” ending, in other words.

The artwork does a decent job conveying spooky atmosphere. In fact, it does the job better than the writing in most cases. Similar haunted castle gamebooks like Monster Mansion had the benefit of character and personality. Which Way’s first volume definitely banks more on the novelty of gamebooks and less on telling an engaging story.

The structure of the book feels a little lazy, too. Most of your choices are located on adjacent pages to one-another. So if one leads to death, all you have to do is turn the page to continue the story!

I suppose it’s possible that they were stilly figuring out the gamebook format with this first outing, which would make this book more of an experiment to test the waters. That’s not to say the book doesn’t have its moments. Monopoly Lady is my favorite character, and manages to also provide the spookiest image.

If you’re looking for more gamebooks to fatten your bookshelf, Which Way Books are a neat find, even if Castle of No Return is one of the weaker ones, for the fact that it reads like an outline that was mistaken for the final draft by a neglectful editor.

But it gave us the best story ending of all time, so it can’t be all bad.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.