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Review by Matt S.

Tin Man Games is the indie workhorse of the iOS games market; every couple of months it releases a new gamebook title, and every couple of months I get hooked on the genre all over again.

If you've never played a gamebook, then you're probably younger than I am, but for the children of the 80's, the gamebooks were our single-player RPGs when we weren't able to get a group together for some Dungeons & Dragons. In the absence of narrative depth in the early PC RPGs and the likes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, we instead read (and played) Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf. Tin Man Games has made a specialty out of the gamebook genre on smartphones and tablets - a natural platform for digital reading. What's especially exciting about these digital gamebooks is that they're often NEW books, and the prospect of new gamebooks is enough to excite the nostalgic amongst us.

Interactive choose-your-own-adventure books managed to capture the attention of many youngsters and adults alike back in the 80s. The advent of videogames more or less killed the artform, but with the iPad and its app-friendly design, gamebooks are back.

As interactive novels, gamebooks allow the reader to play the role of major character in a storyline, a bit like a single-player pen-and-paper RPG. Every 2-5 pages a decision is thrust upon them. From minor decisions about which path to take, or where to sleep that night, to major decisions such which of your friends of family to save first from a bloodthirsty sect intent on your suffering, the reader has a very real influence over the fate of the storyline. What's fascinating about these is that its entirely possible to get very bad endings, and part of the fun of these books is figuring out how to get to the 'right' ending.