Category: CYOA

What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower: Being An Adventure Of Your Own Choosing is a choice-based steampunk story. “As a novel, this isn’t a novel,” writes Jim Eaton, its reviewer at fantasybookreview; and while I tend not to bother arguing labels like “novel” and “game”, I think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t present a number of features that I might ordinarily expect from a genre fantasy novel. The plot(s) are deeply odd, the protagonist hard to know and hard to relate to, the emotional scope a bit dry, the setting too whimsical ever to develop fully. During perhaps my first hour with the book, I would also have said it was not particularly successful as CYOA, full of false starts and arbitrary endings. But I’ve backed off that view a bit: I came to like it better by the time I was done mapping the story, and had had a chance to work out that it’s activist satire with a comedy steampunk gloss.

It begins with a passage about your character that would be verbose but not otherwise out of place in response to an >INVENTORY command:

At the beginning of this tale you are wearing a fashionable, if cheap, suit—complete with black wool overcoat and starched-felt bowler. You have a pocket watch on a chain. But this is no ordinary pocket watch; this pocket watch has been over-wound and is in need of repair. Your wallet is empty of money; they seem to have taken it all at the bar. In one hand you bear a simple, bronze-headed cane of stained wood, born as an affectation. In your trousers pocket you have a silver ring that you won in a game of chance, a ring you were hoping to give your lover. And, of course, you would not leave your room without an ample supply of intoxicants, which may be found in various flasks and bottles upon your person.

Continue reading “What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower (Margaret Killjoy)”