The Vultures Circle Overhead and Pray for My Demise

I explained how I acquired the first four of Tracey Turner's Lost gamebooks in my playthrough of the first one. One thing I didn't mention about Lost in the Jungle of Doom was that it ended with a brief teaser for the second book, Lost in the Desert of Dread. The teaser vaguely implies continuity of character between the books, but the scene-setting passage in Desert makes no mention of my having previously wound up stranded in a jungle, so I could be playing a different individual. It's not that big a deal, but if this were explicitly the same person every time, by about the fourth book I'd expect my character to have been blacklisted by travel agents and transport providers worldwide.

Anyway, I'm in the Sahara Desert. I hadn't realised how massive it is until I saw the map of Africa at the start of the book. Just... wow.

I was on a camel safari, but became separated from the rest of the party during a sandstorm. Exactly what happened after that is a bit vague, but the adventure starts as I wake and throw off the sand-covered blanket under which I was lying. It's day, it's hot, I can see a vulture overhead, and I need to find help. Having been one of the group's water carriers, I have a few bottles of the stuff with me, but they'll only provide what I need for a day or two. Other useful possessions include a spade, matches, an aluminium mess tin, sensible clothing, and sun cream. 

As in the previous book, the intro is followed by a little information about the environment in which I find myself and some of the perils I am liable to face there, followed by a short list of survival tips. Amusingly, the list concludes by pointing out that in circumstances similar to my character's, the best option is probably staying put, doing what you can to attract attention, and waiting to be rescued, and then goes on to ask, "But where's the fun in that?"

So, do I immediately start searching for water, or wait in what little shelter from the sun is available, and travel when it's cooler? A look at the water consumption chart near the back of the book reveals that, depending on the temperature, exertion could potentially double the amount I need to drink, so I'll rest in the shade for a while. That does require me to find shade first, but I can see some boulders up on a ridge, and what could be a building a bit further away. The sidebar on finding shelter mentions that there are some abandoned buildings in the Sahara, so I'll investigate that.

It turns out to be a partially-collapsed mud hut, but the part that's still standing provides the shelter I need for today. Towards sundown, noises alert me to the proximity of a pack of jackals, apparently feeding on something dead. I have the option of trying to scare them off and seeing if I can scavenge any food from the corpse, but that seems a bad idea for a multitude of reasons. The jackals could turn on me, chasing them off will involve a fair bit of exertion even if they don't attack, and the book's already warned me more than once that eating will increase my need for water, so I'm probably better off going hungry for a while.

As I rather fortuitously have an analogue wristwatch, I can use it as a crude compass. The book explains how to do so (and lists some alternate options for people who've gone digital), but the text describing my actions doesn't follow quite the same procedure, and the accompanying illustration doesn't match either (unless the face is askew so that the 12 is not at the top). Based on where I was when we entered the desert, I need to go south or southwest, but working out which direction is which gets that bit more complicated when I'm pointing the wrong part of the face at the setting sun and the picture seems not to even be showing that.

Well, I know that in this hemisphere the sun sets in the west, so if I'm pointing the 12 at the setting sun, south should be in the direction of the 9, right? The book gives me the option of heading in the direction of the 6, 9 or 10, so I think I should go for one of the latter two. I'll go with 9. This takes me across an arid plain towards some sand dunes, which doesn't look massively promising, but depending on how deep into the desert I was when I got lost, there could be a lot of inhospitable terrain even on the best route out.

I've been walking for a while when a hissing sound brings me to a halt. There's a snake on the ground close by. Perhaps more dangerously to me as a reader, the body of the paragraph and the choices available don't entirely match up. There's a not insignificant difference between 'ignore' and 'step around', and 'back away' isn't the same as 'run away'. A sudden movement could startle the snake into attacking, so I try being more cautious - and that's the wrong thing to do. The saw-scaled viper bites me in the ankle, and its venom proves painfully lethal owing to the lack of medical facilities in the vicinity.

A not-so-convenient sidebar across the page from the section describing my death says enough about the temperament and behaviour of the species to make it obvious what I should have done and why (the snake was warning me away, so I needed to back off), but it's too late for that information to do my character any good.

I had a couple more goes at this book between making the failed attempt outlined above and posting this entry. Though I took a slightly different route second time round, I still wound up encountering that saw-scaled viper, but at least by then I knew the appropriate course of action. At every other point where I had to make a choice, the more sensible-seeming option (often suggested or backed up by advice given earlier in the book) had a non-lethal outcome, and I made it to an oasis and civilisation.

My third try suggested that non-suicidal routes through the book might converge in a manner which makes it impossible to win without passing through the 'using the watch as a compass' sequence and the run-in with the snake. If so, it's a pity that the unnecessarily confusing bit and the part where important information is withheld until after the reader could have used it to avert death are unavoidable, but most of the time the book does seem to be playing fair. Not quite up to the standard of the first book in the series, but still pretty good overall.