“They enslave every hominid that can hold a shovel and swing a pick.”

I was excited to start a new gamebook series I’d never heard of, especially one that involved exploring an alien planet a la Edgar Rice Burroughs… although, from the start I had the sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t be romancing any bodacious otherworld princesses or primitive cavebabes on Tenopia. Ah, well.

Turns out the lack of sci-fantasy dating sim encounters was the least of my disappointments with Tenopia Island, the first of the four-volume series, Escape from Tenopia.

I don’t quite know how I’m going to review this with a reasonable wordcount. There really was nothing to be seen here. The premise should be easy for any author to make into an engaging exploratory adventure.

I crash-land on an aquatic planet with a single island, and said island is populated with primitive aliens, the most dominant and dangerous of which are the lobster-clawed, toad-faced, slave-driving crogocides, who immediately capture me and put me to work in their mine. After a few days digging up alien ore, a friendly inmate shows me a secret tunnel back to the surface. Why no one else has used this tunnel to skip out on rock-bashing, I’ll never know.

Armed with only a pocket computer map and my great big brain, I escape the mines and begin my voyage to the city of Zindor, which has the only hot air balloon that can get me off this god-forsaken island of savages.

I get what the series was going for, and the structure of the book is theoretically sound. As you traverse the island, you collect travel information from the locals about what your next destination should be, what areas you should avoid, and which routes are the least risky. You also have to remember details like which direction the sun is rising or setting, so you don’t head in the wrong direction. And you can revisit places to get different interactions with the people you already met.

Basically, the whole book is a complex series of paths that loop back on one-another, so by the end of the adventure you feel like you’ve fully explored this alien continent. There is evidently no “game over” to speak of: you just take endless detours until you know every inch of the island and eventually find your destination, thus mounting your escape. Kind of a walking simulator in gamebook form.

In theory, that is. With another author, this could have been incredibly immersive. But Tenopia Island uses a narrative style so braindead simple that nothing is ever really fleshed out, so the whole experience isn’t so much “immersive” as it is “tossed at you in bored summary.” Read the passage in the screenshot as an example. The whole book is like this: bland, uninspired, and lacking any kind of detail or energy that an epic adventure like this should have. The closest to anything interesting we get is the idea of making a statue of myself as a requirement, and the bird people rolling their eyes at my awful ceramics skills, all of which deserves to be a scene, not a throwaway remark.

Even for a book aimed at younger readers, it seems far too basic a reading level for the high concepts suggested in the narrative, which middle-grade readers would eat up by the spoonful. It makes me wish more gamebook authors had tried to tell an engaging story with the format, rather than banking solely on the format to carry the adventure through.

Calling this an adventure is false advertising. Full stop. You’ll spend 90% of the narrative traveling and getting directions. When something actually does happen, it’s an afterthought. I was so desperate for something exciting to happen that I deliberately made risky choices that might put my life in danger, and I was always let down.

For example, in one settlement a guide tells me to be careful if I visit the local prince, as he is a paranoid sonofgun who will do terrible things to me if he even suspects me to be a crogocide spy. Cool, maybe something will actually happen if I drop in unannounced. Nope, Prince Schmoe is very genial, and happy to give me directions. Just what I need. More directions. Can you give me anything else besides more directions? I’ve got so many directions I’m tripping over them. What I wouldn’t give for a space rifle, or an alien pet, or a barbarian princess. Let’s consult the map again. Yup, going the right way. Hi there birdfolks, thanks for letting me have some fish. Whoops, there’s the crogocides out for my blood. Cross the creek and easily escape in the same sentence. Follow the river through the forest. Ditch the crogocides again. How does anyone ever get caught by these guys anyway? Get lost in the storm and backtrack to Prince Schmoe for shelter. Maybe something different happens now. Yes! He gives me different, more specific directions! Fantastic! Back to traveling! Let’s check the map again! Sigh…

10 for 10, I sought adventure in this adventure and found nothing. This is not an adventure. This is a travelogue, and a first draft at that, with all the mouth-watering, tourist-enticing details chopped out. At the very least, with a book like this, every location should dip me neck-deep in the setting. The roads are just roads, the vegetation is just vegetation, the birdfolk are just birdfolk. One time I saw a tower that had a few words of flavortext regarding a local deity who supposedly kept the sea from swallowing the island, and I have just committed more words to that idea than the author of the book did. Tenopia Island is so boring, empty, and tedious that even as I’m reading the text on the page, I have to keep re-reading it because I space out and try to go somewhere more interesting. The series title should have been Escape from Nothingberg.

The art sure is nice, though. Has a bit of a 2000 A.D. look to it.

What was I talking about again?

Oh, right. I was talking about how I’ll never touch another Tenopia book again. Nor its sequel, Escape from the Kingdom of Frome, if it’s anywhere near as dull as this.