WeirdwoodI just finished iPad reading this interactive novel called Weirdwood Manor. Although the word finished is relative. After spending money for 6 books in the series, I got to the end only to realize the end hasn’t been written. I was so pissed off.  There was no warning about this fact when I purchased the first 6 “books.” It’s like buying a novel and then getting to the end to find out you need to buy another novel that contains the real ending.

Not cool.

There were some good things about the story: it's a good example of narrative gaming (happily more heavily on the narrative than most) and it’s all about the love of books. There is a good system of hints to help you find every hidden thing, although you can’t easily get back to items you’ve missed unless you reread the entire book and touch all its hidden areas again, which is crazy. Since there wasn’t much payoff for peaking behind every hiding place, I stopped trying to go back and get a perfect "score." I also got tired of the puzzles after a while; they took too much manual dexterity for me (an old fart who never plays online games) and I can only imagine how kids with disabilities would do with them.

The music is great and the story is full of fun allusions to other fairy tales.  But the end dissolves into a tangle of imaginative theory about the nature of imagination.

Next book release date? Nowhere to be found doing a quick Google search so I’m moving on. Hope it all turns out.