Warlock of Firetop Mountain
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DEVELOPER TIN MAN GAMES PUBLISHER TIN MAN GAMES PRICE $ 19.95 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM tinmangames.com.au
Fighting Fantasy (FF) is a series of once-popular “gamebooks” invented by gaming luminaries Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The basic idea with FF books is that they combine the branching narrative of a Choose Your Own Adventure with light, D&Dish roleplaying.
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, published in 1982, was the very first FF novel and is generally regarded as one of the best. Simplicity is its chief virtue, the narrative being a flimsy excuse for a straight-up dungeon crawl through Firetop Mountain to find and kill its warlock master, Zagor.
Built with Tim Man’s gamebook adventure engine, the digital version of Warlock is pretty faithful to the book. Action is viewed from an isometric top-down perspective, with Firetop’s labyrinthine innards taking the form of what looks like an enormous and highly elaborate tabletop set, with your character and NPCs represented by miniatures.
The bulk of your time with Warlock will be spent reading. Virtual “pages” drop from the top of the screen describing the scene, usually with text and art straight from the book, and you’re given a selection of options (usually two) to choose from. True to the source material, it can be difficult to predict the probable consequences of any given choice, so you’ll often find yourself choosing blindly and hoping for the best – which is gratifying when things go your way, but frustrating when they don’t.
The book’s RPG elements have been faithfully reproduced and augmented. Instead of rolling a character you select one from a roster of archetypes, each possessing different values for the
Text descriptions, still images, Skill, Stamina, and Luck… it all feels a bit quaint, honestly
game’s three key stats: Stamina, Skill, and Luck. Similarly to D&D, these stats are used to determine success or failure for a given challenge. Running across a crumbling bridge, for example, would test your Luck: roll lower than your Luck score and you make it, otherwise not.
Stats are also used in combat, which is a turn- and grid-based thing where decisions play out simultaneously, like a drastically simplified Frozen Synapse. The idea is to predict your enemy’s moves: if you think they’re gonna be in the square above you, you’d attack that square. It’s quite basic and, frankly, not very entertaining. Monsters behave in predictable patterns and will often do the same stupid thing over and over, making most encounters trivial, even for a non-combat focused character.
I like Warlock, but it’s difficult to get invested in it. This isn’t a problem with the game so much as the genre: the heyday of FF was more than thirty years ago and our sensibilities have changed significantly in the interim. Text descriptions, still images, Skill, Stamina, and Luck… it all feels a bit quaint, honestly.
But then I’m not Warlock’s target audience, which I suspect is young and casual gamers who’ll appreciate the game’s simplicity, generous difficulty, and undemanding system requirements. For FF fans, it’s a pleasant nostalgia trip… the kind that makes you appreciate just how far we’ve come. DAN STAINES