I Analyse Gamebooks: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Stake Your Destiny The Suicide King

 

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Stake Your Destiny: The Suicide King

There are three rules to being the chosen one, the vampire slayer. Always listen to your watcher, never fall in love with a vampire, and do not read this book in sequential order. Yes that’s right this is a BtVS Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-is-a-trademark-of-Chooseco style game book.

When I first got this (from Poundland for £1) I was unimpressed; it appeared to have a few choices investigating at the start then run into a linear sequence where you picked the right path or came to a bad end. That’s not quite what this is though.

A demon that causes people to commit suicide comes to town. They move from victim to victim by putting themselves into a piece of writing. There’s a scroll that was the original writing, and it’s being hunted by two groups, one pro-demon, one anti-demon. As it turns out there’s two main routes the investigation can take, one where you find the anti-demon group and one where you follow the pro-demon group. These each turn into a path that can go to disaster in multiple ways, or lead to one of the two canonical endings.

The failures range from complete disaster and (non-canonical) death for you (Buffy) through to stopping the demon at the cost of another character, through to being derailed and (non-canonically) sent away from Sunnydale to live with your father. These are intriguing, hinting at possible routes not taken. Without Buffy will the various creatures trying to use the hellmouth succeed and bring on an apocalypse? A more interesting choice there!

This has a fairly interesting hook as a story, suicides at the school, and bringing Buffy in by immediately by having an appointment with the suicide counselor (who, obviously, is involved in the various shenanigans). From there you can, potentially meet up with all the various characters involved at this stage of BtVS, or try some solo detective work, hanging around with some of the allies of the week (game book). I don’t know if this meshes well with the way that BtVS works, though the way the plot could be resolved in two ways does sort of comment on the show – maybe it’ll be a big action setpiece, or maybe it’ll be a dramatic high-stakes special effects magic ending.

As I said I was unimpressed, and it’s certainly flawed. The ease of failure which seems unmarked by either the book itself or knowledge of the show would seem to indicate you’re supposed to do the one finger in the last page thing. Even at it’s best it’s pastiching the show, and frankly I don’t care about BtVS at this late date. The long sections over multiple pages alternate between trying to do some snarky Buffy bits with describing things more easily shown on a TV screen. Still, it was crafted with intention, with something to say about BtVS. In the end it's something of a curiosity of a cash-in, peripheral content for an IP, yet one that can be learned from.

I’m not seeking out the others though.

Read This: Fast moving, generally fun game book that demonstrates some design ideas
Don’t Read This: Outdated cash-in spin-off of old show