Super Strength Potion. No Artificial Colors or Flavors.

This one’s a doozy, and not in a good way. It’s one of those books that makes me want to quit.

I don’t mean quit writing, I mean quit life in general and go live under a mountain.

It’s a shame, too, because the cover for this one promises a surreal good time. My favorite is President Clifford doing his Nixon impression for his constituents.

The premise for Formula for Trouble would work pretty well as a much longer gamebook. For a pocket-sized Twistaplot book, it’s a goofy, eye-rolling mess…and small wonder the name “Stine” had something to do with it. Don’t worry, the culprit isn’t R. L. Stine this time, but Megan Stine, author of a Goosebumps TV episodes and several children’s books, including a series of books about extremely famous and influential figures like Michael Jackson, Queen Elizabeth, Ulysses S Grant, and…uh…Michelle Obama…?

Let’s move on.

You are friends with an absentminded failure of a professor whose inventions always go topsy-turvy. You’re so jaded about his ineptitude that you fully expect his new strength potion formula to do something absolutely awful to anyone dumb enough to drink it, but you’re bored and suicidal and decide to give it a go anyway while the prof is out of his house.

The gimmick here is that the choices you make in the first couple chapters will decide what the formula actually does. In one branch, it turns you into a teen wolf, and you go on misadventures through town scaring the living daylights out of everyone. In another, your dog eats it, becomes super intelligent, and bosses you around. In yet another, your friend drinks it, turns invisible, and becomes a low-tier supervillain. Still more plots involve getting roped into a spy adventure and fighting a rival professor for the formula.

Any one of these branches, though, would have worked better as its own story, especially with Twistaplot’s limited page count. You can do a lot with a story about an invisible agent (they made movies about it, in fact!). I liked the concept of the protagonist being kept as a pet by his super-intelligent dog, too. There are good ideas buried in here for sure.

But because the formula has so many potential effects, you instead end up with a dozen or so subplots that are weak as a baby fart, rather than one really fun and engaging adventure. Most of them feel so rushed and corny it’s cringey to read them. If you told me this book was cranked out in one afternoon, I would believe it.

The art is…off-putting. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s a dream-like uncanny valley thing going on here. The dog somehow looks more human than the humans do in most of these illustrations.

There’s one relatively interesting bit in the secret agent branch where you have to crack a code, but otherwise the usual Twistaplot fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans are afoot. Sometimes the choices are worded in an amusing manner. Mostly it’s the usual goofy narrative style that doesn’t take itself seriously at all, which gets tiring really quick. The line I opened this article with is just one of countless examples. Many of the professor’s past inventions are mentioned throughout the story, and they get so nonsensical (including but not limited to postcards that quack when dipped in water) that they quickly wear out their welcome. Although I admit I laughed at the sunblock formula that didn’t keep you from getting sunburned, but did feel an awful lot like poison ivy. Like I said, there are a few good ideas buried inside this mess.

Not a whole lot to say about this one, except perhaps, “Avoid.”

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.