Choose Your Future: Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green; Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale

I’ve previous written up the Find Your Fate, FASA and Decide Your Destiny Doctor Who game books. These are two Twelfth Doctor choose-your-own-adventure books, both published in 2016. I’m not aware of any more of this type of book being produced since.

Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green

Second paragraph of Chapter 3:

Warily, the Doctor approaches the rider and, when the man still doesn’t react, grabs hold of his hat and throws it aside. What he sees makes him leap backwards again.

As with Green’s previous game book, The Horror of Howling Hill, this is set in southern England – 18th century Cornwall, to be precise – and is rather well written, capturing the Capaldi Doctor very well. It has several different storylines, most of which revolve around the Kraa’Kn (an aquatic alien monster, of course) with a galactic smuggler and a barmaid playing walk-on roles, but other variants include the Terileptils and a brief appearance of a clockwork robot. There are numerous endings, including one in which the Doctor is killed by zombies and another in which he is stuck in a perpetual time loop.

A structural gimmick which was new to me – at several points your choice is constrained by what has happened before, eg chapter 78:

If the Doctor has already visited the Hispaniola Inn, go to 142.
If not, go to 103.

This is a very interesting way of creating new lines through the structure. Unfortunately it’s a bit too clever – there is a set of five chapters, starting with Chapter 12, which are orphaned (and I couldn’t see where they were meant to fit – Chapter 12 starts with the Doctor heading toward the village with the smuggler, but no other chapter offers that as an option).

Anyway, more interesting than I expected.

Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Voice-activated photonic projectors raise the light level. The Doctor is standing in the middle of an extensive laboratory littered with advanced scientific equipment.

A somewhat more diffuse book, with lots of different and quite independent timelines for adventures of the Twelfth Doctor on an unnamed moon. (Though in one variant he goes back to contemporary earth for an adventure with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.) This also has the feature I noted from some of the Decide Your Destiny books, where the player makes choices that I would have expected to be made by the writer, eg Chaper 78:

If you think the sonic will open the airlock, tap here to go to Entry 118.
If you think the airlock will stay shut, tap here to go to Entry 83.

Some rather good lines, but I prefer when the multiple storylines in these books are all set in more or less the same universe as each other. Baxendale also wrote three of the Decide Your Destiny books, which I likewise found average rather than compelling.

You can get Night of the Kraken here and Terror Moon here.

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