For more information, you must complete the spaceport maze.

For being such an incredibly fun and memorable book series, the first installment of Be an Interplanetary Spy is pretty weak. Later installments will have more engaging stories and games, but I guess this first volume really boiled down to an experiment, to see if kids would latch onto the series or not.

Still, would’ve helped if they’d had a stronger first go.

In our very first adventure as an Interplanetary Spy, we are to hunt down and capture Phatax the Kirillian, and recover the prince he’s kidnapped, who is keeper of the royal jewels. We are quite literally being sent after a jewel thief. I’ll grant you, if this is technically our first outing as an Interplanetary Spy, they’d probably want to give us a relatively easy assignment, so I can’t fault them there. Also, the jewels turn out to be more than just jewels later in the story, so it’s not like we’re just out to recover the Mona Lisa.

So why are we, an entry level spy, being sent to beat up Godzilla? This guy is the size of a New York hotel! This seems like a job for a heavily armed regiment, not the guy who just got promoted from clerical work!

Before we even finish our briefing, we have to make it to our shuttlecraft and risk immediately losing our job. I suppose this is the “idiot proof” part of the mission. Can’t send a guy out into space if he gets lost in his own building, can we?

The briefing keeps things a bit too simple for my taste, especially with this random maze being thrown in halfway through. Definitely feels like the author’s first attempt at a book with this format. But at least here we get different outcomes.

The biggest gripes I have with this first BAIPS book is a combination of generic multi-use endings and games that aren’t really games. There are three endings that get used quite a lot, even when it’s not appropriate:

“Aw shucks, you got called away to another mission for some reason.”

“Everything randomly blows up!”

“You suddenly get jumped by one of Phatax’s agent and get imprisoned.”

But then there are the pointless exercises and missed opportunities. The first image is an example of a non-game, where I’m given a maze that I can complete, yet the outcome is fixed: whether I make it through or not, I still turn to Page 25 to watch my ship get destroyed, so it feels like a waste of time. I see no reason why I couldn’t have been given the option to get out of this one somehow. There are several examples of this throughout the book and with so many generic multi-use bad endings it seems strange that there were no options offered in these situations.

The second image is a lost opportunity, which isn’t quite as frequent as the pointless exercises illustrated on the left. As much as I love the image of me disguised as a space-shroom roughing up a wolfman, it would’ve been fun to have a minigame where I must determine the authenticity of the jewels and risk taking home the fakes.

The artwork is as phenomenal here as in the other entries, though, so there’s always something neat to look at. Everything gives a sense of place that immerses you in the story, like the techno pages where you’re asked to enter your spy code, or give your spaceship a secret name. Other cool touches make you feel like you’re really along for the ride, like the zoom-in scan of an alien city your ship is fast approaching.

And who doesn’t want a robot dog for a pet? I really wish the robot dog was used more. Later books will give us sidekicks and pets to take along with us on our adventures, so don’t worry.

And despite being the first entry, Find the Kirillian doesn’t lack creative deaths and other macabre scenes–it doesn’t just rely on those three generic bad endings where you get arrested, blown up, or pulled from the case. Sometimes you get et by creatures, or used for tennis practice by a giant alien child, or even eaten by an oversized roomba! And when you finally find Prince Quizon, he’s been tortured so badly that he’s lost his eyesight!

When you rescue the prince, you’re given the option to write in which planet you teleport the prince to for safety. It asks if you remember the name of his home planet, but you get about nine different options. There’s no penalty for choosing the wrong one, and I suppose there wouldn’t be right away, since you wouldn’t find out ’til the mission debriefing that you’d accidentally sent him to the Planet of the Hungry Lizard Women. When I found out I’d chosen the wrong planet, I spent the rest of the adventure wondering what had become of the poor blind idiot and chuckling to myself.

Spies are mean.

I have to wonder about these royal jewels of his, too. Near the end we discover that they have supernatural powers: to mold sand, to heal grievous wounds, among other powers. At first I thought this made for a good reason why their recovery was so important, but then I asked myself if others get to benefit from these powers, or just the royal family. Also, Phatax’s scheme is to make counterfeits and sell them multiple times, but does anyone other than Phatax and the royal family know that they’re magical? If not, Phatax wouldn’t get very far with his little scam (big scam?) before the Space Mafia came gunning for him.

It is pretty gnarly when he crushes the counterfeiter in his giant hand though. We don’t usually get gruesome deaths in these books other than those of the hero.

There are definitely better entries in BAIPS than this first outing, but if you want the whole set, it’s essential to have the book where it all started. My first experience as an interplanetary spy was in the second volume, The Galactic Pirate, and I never read this one at all until now. It’s okay, but honestly it’s hard to beat volumes 2 through 6. The rest I wouldn’t bother with unless you’re a completionist.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.