The Spaceship Graveyard

If you’ve always wanted to read a doctor who chose your own adventure book, that’s too bad cause this isn’t it.

Instead of making choices for your self insert character 90% of the time you’re deciding ridiculous things like what’s in the next room you go into, which I feel takes all the fun out of the concept. It’s hard to feel like this is a coherent setting when, well, it just isn’t one, or that you’re a character in the story when you don’t actually do much at all as that character. A lot of very meaningless choices as well, that essentially lead to the same outcome.

You can’t even lose the game which is a shame, because some kind of bad ending might have at least been a little interesting. Oh yeah the story isn’t any good either.

The only positive to this I can see is that it’s a very short book so you won’t waste too much of your time reading it.

As a book this delivers the absolute bare minimum experience acceptable for a child audience. A barely coherent plot with no real stakes, choices or character development.

As a story to read / engage with daily alongside other tardis.guide forum users it’s a lot of fun!

In a word, disappointing.

The Spaceship Graveyard consistently promises to be more interesting than it is. The eventual setting, we find out, is a graveyard of spaceships that have had their energy drained to prevent the planetoid from falling into a black hole. It's a great setting that ends up mostly just being a backdrop for your meaningless decisions.

When I say meaningless decisions, I thoroughly mean in, multiple times two decisions lead to exactly the same result, and then same next set of choices, which makes the choose your own adventure side of this feel underwhelming. Additionally, the vast majority of decisions made in this book aren't decisions made by you, they're decisions about the world you find yourself in. Does the corridor open into the captain's quarters or the bridge? What do I know, why do I care? That's not something my character should be able to control.

The most frustrating part is that all the endings you can reach are nearly the same bar two, and the only way to get onto the path that leads to those two is one of those decisions that your character should be able to affect.

On the one hand, there's only so much you can do with a book in 100 pages, let alone a choose your own adventure book, but this ends up failing as both a story and a choose your own ad venture story (the latter in multiple ways).