It's my 400th post here, which strikes me as being as good a reason as any to return to the topic of gamebooks it is impossible to fail. I've already spent some time going on about the more linear variety, in which the plot follows essentially the same beats and progresses to the same ending no matter what choices you make, here.
However, there are also books in which your decisions do make a difference - sometimes to the extent that a completely different adventure happens (or fails to) depending on some of the earlier choices made - but all of the endings are 'good'. Some may be better than others, but failure is not going to happen, no matter what you do.
William Rotsler's Star Trek III gamebook The Vulcan Treasure fits more into this category than the preceding one, though all routes throught the book do end at the same Epilogue section. Pedantic geeky digression: exactly what the book has to do with the third Star Trek film is unclear, as (do I need to add a spoiler warning for films from over 4 decades ago?) Mister Spock is an active member of the Enterprise crew throughout the book, even though he's basically dead at the start of the movie, and by the time he's properly alive again the ship has been destroyed, with no point during the narrative into which the events of the book could be shoehorned.
Continuity concerns aside, it's a pretty straightforward plot. The U.S.S. Enterprise discovers clues hinting at the whereabouts of the crown jewels of Vulcan, sent away from the planet for safety during the civil war centuries ago, and lost ever since. Captain Kirk and his crew investigate, at various points along the way the reader decides what happens next, things occur (I avoid using the term 'adventure' here, because in many instances that would be overselling the sequence of events), and ultimately the missing treasure is found and prompts some pseudo-philosophical waffle about what is truly of value in the universe.
I said 'what happens next' rather than 'what the ship's crew do' above, because this is one of those gamebooks where the reader has greater control over the narrative - for example, getting to choose whether or not a corridor turns out to be booby-trapped. While I'm not as hostile towards that sort of thing as some gamebook fans, it's not one that appeals to me much, either. Still, my issues with this book have less to do with the occasional immersion-breaking decision than with the fact that so many of the paths through the book just aren't very interesting.
Reader choice occasionally influencing more than just the actions of the viewpoint character is also an aspect of some of the Doctor Who-based Decide Your Destiny gamebooks. But only some - the lack of consistency across this series is remarkable. Or should that be 'these series'? There are two separate numbered runs, one set during the first David Tennant era, the other in Matt Smith's run. And only half of the Matt Smith ones qualify for mention here, as the series unexpectedly introduced the possibility of failure into the last two books.
Setting aside the books with some bad endings for proper playthroughs at some future point, the rest are variable. Some intermittently allow the reader to decide what happens, others only allow you to choose the actions taken by the Doctor and/or his companions. Some have a coherent central plot, others diversify into different and mutually incompatible narratives. Some take an interesting premise and develop it into an engaging adventure, others rely on a clichéd set-up and waste whatever potential it may still have. Some are decently structured, others give the impression that the author never really cared about continuity from one section to the next (for one particularly sloppy book I created a mini-game based on seeing how many times my character could make the same 'shocking' discovery during a single playthrough).
In a way it's appropriate - Doctor Who the TV series has at times been similarly inconsistent, with some of its highest peaks and lowest troughs close together in broadcast order - but I'd have preferred not to have the books that are just dull and uninspired. I got the original run of twelve books as a job lot, but anyone buying individual books from the series would (at least until they learned which authors' names were to be taken as red flags) have little to no idea whether they'd be getting an enjoyable (if limited) gamebook or a waste of paper and time.
While I'm talking about Doctor Who gamebooks, I'll also give a dishonourable mention to part of Michael Holt's Crisis in Space from the Find Your Fate series. I say 'part of' because this book has a design feature I've never seen anywhere else, splitting into a 'no possibility of failure' linearity-fest and a more conventional (but still rubbish) gamebook at the first decision. Pick one destination, and your subsequent choices (and the occasional roll of a die) will have some effect on whether you live, die, or get press-ganged into becoming a hair stylist for the villain's consort (yes, that really is one of the possible ways of failing). Go for the other option, and all roads lead to the same partial victory (except for the typo that takes you to the wrong section, relocating you to another planet and the narrative strand where you can influence the outcome). Almost 40% of the sections are taken up with this 'fixed outcome' route, including a load of 'No, you've taken the wrong turning' padding towards the end of one sub-path. Crisis might not quite be the worst gamebook I've ever encountered, but I'd be surprised if any other can beat it for sheer variety of flaws and bad ideas.
Another slightly questionable fit for this post is The Mind Master, the second book in Philip Herriott's inconsistent Magic Mystery series. The book has three endings - two partial victories and one complete success - and a few less positive non-endings. Two of these are the kind of 'you messed up, so go back to section 1 and choose better' cop-out used in the F.E.A.R. Adventures series, while the other would be a proper 'fail' ending if it weren't for the way it's presented. In essence, the relevant page says, "You're in a dire situation. You can either seek help (turn to another page) or accept abject defeat." What reader, presented with such a choice, is going to pick the latter option? Well, I suppose that, since the only person available to help in the situation is a woman, a really hard-core misogynist might decide 'I'd rather fall victim to the bad guy than be rescued by a female', but really...
I've only read one of Carolyn Keene & Franklin W. Dixon's Be A Detective Mystery Stories gamebooks, and thus cannot be certain that it is representative of the series as a whole, but at the very least book 3, The Feathered Serpent, has only successful endings. A third person narrative, featuring the authors' characters Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, it frequently presents the reader with a different kind of choice than most gamebooks: on which character the narrative is to focus. There's little to no consistency between different paths through the book - the identity of the criminal(s) and even the nature of the crime being perpetrated varies from one route to the next. As mysteries, they're not that great, with clues frequently being discovered 'off-page', or not revealed until whichever of the amateur sleuths has figured things out chooses to show off how they solved the case, or villains proving incapable of keeping from confessing the moment they're confronted with even the flimsiest of evidence against them.
Oh, and on many of the plot strands, the book's title is rather misleading. In a few instances it refers to a smuggled antique, but the rest of the time it has nothing to do with the story (beyond the fact that it refers to a Mesoamerican deity, and a separate strand of the investigation is being conducted in Mexico).
To end on a more positive note, I'll finish with Douglas Hill's Have your own extra-terrestrial adventure. This is a noirish first-person narrative, in which the viewpoint character is interplanetary investigator Del Curb, the only human to survive an encounter with the alien psychopath known as Rimeq the Renegade.
Curb is approached by the Federation Police to assist with the hunt for Rimeq, who claims to be in possession of a weapon that could destroy all life on Earth, and is threatening to use it if he doesn't get his own way. And 'assist' is the right word: the FedPol are carrying out a large-scale search for Rimeq with their own resources, but there are places that are off-limits to them, which is why they're also bringing in Curb. While, for Curb, all roads do lead to Rimeq, the fact that his investigations are just one small aspect of a much bigger operation makes a pleasant change from the 'you must undertake this mission alone for no adequately explained reason' set-up found in a lot of gamebooks.
Like many of the gamebooks mentioned above, it branches into an assortment of mutually incompatible storylines: the first decision concerns which of two very different planets to investigate, and Rimeq and the weapon are on whichever one you pick. Still, the different stories into which the plot develops depending on the decisions you make are all entertaining, and the fact that some endings are more satisfying victories than others goes a little way towards making up for any loss of tension occasioned by the certainty of Curb's surviving and thwarting Rimeq.
As I recently mentioned, inventive, nasty, and/or well-written ‘bad’ endings have been part of gamebooks’ appeal to me for almost as long as I've been reading them, and there's plenty of evidence that I’m not the only person for whom the sections describing defeat hold some fascination. Nevertheless, a few of the books mentioned above prove that it is possible to create an entertaining gamebook even when failure is literally not an option. Perhaps when I’m next killing time in the vicinity of a selection of second-hand books and chance upon a new-to-me gamebook at a ‘not sure if worth it’ price, I won’t be so quick to reshelve it if a quick perusal fails to reveal any juicy deaths.
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