🪝🎰🚂 Review: Shakespeare vs Chtulhu
Feb. 13th, 2026 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightPlaythrough/Review: Shakespeare vs Cthulhu: What Dreams May Come
What is it?
A Gamebook/Choose Your Own Adventure in which you take on the role of one William Shakespeare.
Is it playable out of the box?
Yes.
Amendments:
It’s more fun if you know your Shakespeare.
Tools
4d6, but more are better. (I rolled 4 pairs of d6 at one point).
Price:
$18; offers may be available (it seems to be half price quite often)
Verdict
🪝 Great Hook
🎰 Too much chance
🚂 Honourably Retired
I played through this and I only cheated twice. Once because I lost 13 rolls in a row against a much weaker opponent (still won the fight, but barely, and, really: that is not a good mechanic), and once because the game threw instadeath at me, which isn’t gameplay: if you present something as a viable option, it should be viable.
In the end, this is a gamebook: while you roll dice and make decisions, a lot of decisions are either meaningless for players (turn left or right) and the book contains a lot of ‘you do this, that, and the other, which do you do now’ – dialogue is written for you, decisions are made for you, and at the end of a scene you eventually DO get a choice, but it still feels very, very railroady, and I found it impossible to identify with the character even in my usual third person/shoulder cam perspective.
So those are faults that are part of the system itself, and while you probably can execute this better or worse, the flaws are inherent in the system.
What’s not inherent is that this is a PDF without anchors so when it says ‘go to 437’ you have to scroll manually to 437, which means there is always a chance you catch a sentence or two from other sections, which may or may not lead to spoilers. In many ways, this would be better suited to a video game or a PDF where every section sits on its own page.
Particularly annoying is that the introduction tells you that there are sections hidden within the game text, which just encourages you to read ahead.
This could have been solved much better.
I’ve also come across one incontinuity, and many plot threads are never resolved.
Plus I hoped to spend a little more time in some of the plays and found myself whisked away quickly.
This experience played out more or less as I expected. I had one ‘choose your own adventure’ book as a kid and didn’t find it very interesting then; this one had a few more choices and a few more stats plus an actual rolling/card pulling mechanism, but it still steamrolled you in places, and the fundamental structural issues are inbuilt so that a different author cannot make them go away.
All in all I am not unhappy I grabbed this in a sale (I have another gamebook hanging around somewhere that I picked up for a dollar), but while there are choices, this barely matches the definition of ‘roleplaying’,
I may go through this again in a few years, and after a couple of playthroughs, I probably will satisfy my curiosity by reading it.
I played this for most of the month – not as my only game, but I picked it up most days and continued until I was bored or had no idea which choice I should take. (Some choices seemed very obvious. Which doesn't mean I would have been right about them.) I did have fun, but more in a 'I skimmed a not very good novel' than in a roleplaying way.
What is it?
A Gamebook/Choose Your Own Adventure in which you take on the role of one William Shakespeare.
Is it playable out of the box?
Yes.
Amendments:
It’s more fun if you know your Shakespeare.
Tools
4d6, but more are better. (I rolled 4 pairs of d6 at one point).
Price:
$18; offers may be available (it seems to be half price quite often)
Verdict
🪝 Great Hook
🎰 Too much chance
🚂 Honourably Retired
I played through this and I only cheated twice. Once because I lost 13 rolls in a row against a much weaker opponent (still won the fight, but barely, and, really: that is not a good mechanic), and once because the game threw instadeath at me, which isn’t gameplay: if you present something as a viable option, it should be viable.
In the end, this is a gamebook: while you roll dice and make decisions, a lot of decisions are either meaningless for players (turn left or right) and the book contains a lot of ‘you do this, that, and the other, which do you do now’ – dialogue is written for you, decisions are made for you, and at the end of a scene you eventually DO get a choice, but it still feels very, very railroady, and I found it impossible to identify with the character even in my usual third person/shoulder cam perspective.
So those are faults that are part of the system itself, and while you probably can execute this better or worse, the flaws are inherent in the system.
What’s not inherent is that this is a PDF without anchors so when it says ‘go to 437’ you have to scroll manually to 437, which means there is always a chance you catch a sentence or two from other sections, which may or may not lead to spoilers. In many ways, this would be better suited to a video game or a PDF where every section sits on its own page.
Particularly annoying is that the introduction tells you that there are sections hidden within the game text, which just encourages you to read ahead.
This could have been solved much better.
I’ve also come across one incontinuity, and many plot threads are never resolved.
Plus I hoped to spend a little more time in some of the plays and found myself whisked away quickly.
This experience played out more or less as I expected. I had one ‘choose your own adventure’ book as a kid and didn’t find it very interesting then; this one had a few more choices and a few more stats plus an actual rolling/card pulling mechanism, but it still steamrolled you in places, and the fundamental structural issues are inbuilt so that a different author cannot make them go away.
All in all I am not unhappy I grabbed this in a sale (I have another gamebook hanging around somewhere that I picked up for a dollar), but while there are choices, this barely matches the definition of ‘roleplaying’,
I may go through this again in a few years, and after a couple of playthroughs, I probably will satisfy my curiosity by reading it.
I played this for most of the month – not as my only game, but I picked it up most days and continued until I was bored or had no idea which choice I should take. (Some choices seemed very obvious. Which doesn't mean I would have been right about them.) I did have fun, but more in a 'I skimmed a not very good novel' than in a roleplaying way.
