Full of winding tunnels and fearsome magical traps for intruders, the tower of the reclusive spellbinder princess is usually impossible to breach—apart from tonight. Once every ten years the gates of the Locked Keep open for the masquerade ball, and it’s your one chance to get inside. Choose to sneak, charm or fight your way up to the room of confiscated magical objects at the top of her tower, where there is something you desperately want…
Welcome to Into the Tower , a fantasy heist where the reader chooses their path, trying to make their way through magic, monsters, and perils to the top of the mysterious spellbinder princess’s tower. Into the Tower expands on the world of Into the Dungeon, bringing even more excitement and adventure from award-winning writer and artist Hari Conner.
If you survive your journey up the tower, you can find out the secrets of the princess’s past and why she locked herself away, become one of the monsters slowly consuming humanity, lose yourself forever in the source of all magic, destroy the world—or even, on the right path, change it for the better.
Hari Conner is an award-winning author/ illustrator who usually writes fantasy, historical and queer romance - sometimes at the same time.
They're the creator of the now-complete webcomic Finding Home, choose-your-own-path books including Into the Tower, and the graphic novel I Shall Never Fall in Love, out 2024.
Hari grew up drawing comics in class in South London and now lives in Scotland, pursuing their quest to find wheelchair accessible forests.
My first "choose-your-adventure" book and it was amazing!
I would like to thank Andrews McMeel Publishing, Hari Conner and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This book gives you the opportunity to choose from 4 characters or to create one of your own.
I chose The Sailor from all four characters and I managed to go through a great journey, having such a great ending! The story is the same from all perspectives. Each character has a backstory but they all have a reason to go into the Tower.
Based on the attributes you have you can go through different experiences. The book takes a weird turn at some point, becoming horror-ish. I loved it!
Unfortunately I only managed to play the story once, experiencing the Sailor's point of view. But I have this book on my wishlist and I'll buy it in physical form, too.
Can't wait to experience the other stories as well!
Thanks to the Author and Netgalley for the free book in return for an honest review.
I love gamebooks, always have, since way back when the first fighting fantasy came out all those years ago, so I'm always intrigued to find a new book and even more so when it doesn't follow the format of those books I grew up with.
First up, this isn't for kids, there's a whole lot of adult themes in here and a whole lot more imagery that's not like anything that you'll have seen in other books of this sort, most of which have at least some leanings towards being accessible by kids.
Second, it's shorter than most of the books that I grew up with, but the chapters herein aren't just single paragraphs, they're sometimes pages, sometimes multiple pages long, so you've got to be prepared to read through at length and consider everything that's been put on the page.
With that in mind, I've got to say I greatly enjoyed this, I loved the special abilities for some of the characters, including one that allows you to write down the reference that you came from so you can always make things right. Not to say that I don't still play with all my fingers acting as separate bookmarks, but the permission to note that down was a nice nod to how things were played in the past.
Overall this was superb, so much so that I'm going to check out the other books in the series, it's not for kids, but I'm not a kid anymore, and this, this was definitely for me.
"W mroku wieży" to kolejna książka Hariego Connera, czyli autora "W mroku podziemi". Tym razem oferuje nam historię jeszcze bardziej rozbudowaną, a co za tym idzie- angażującą i z nieoczywistymi zwrotami fabuły.
Złodziej/ka, akolita/ka, libertyn/ka, żeglarz/ka, a może postać stworzona samodzielnie? W tej książkowej grze macie okazję przybrać dowolną tożsamość i wyruszyć do tajemniczej wieży, do której dostęp jest ściśle strzeżony, aby na jej szczycie odnaleźć pożądane skarby i magiczne artefakty. Podczas podróży traficie do pełnych niebezpieczeństw pomieszczeń, ale zapoznacie też nieoczywiste postacie i poznacie sekrety wieży i zamkniętej w niej księżniczki. To zdecydowanie historia, która zaangażuje was na długie godziny. Oferuje wiele rozwiązań, które prowadzić mogą do nieoczekiwanych spotkań. Całość ponownie urozmaicona jest przepięknymi ilustracjami, dodającymi klimatu całej historii.
Tym razem dostrzegam, że autor poświęcił jeszcze więcej czasu na wykreowanie fascynującej fabuły i losów pobocznych każdej z postaci, dzięki czemu poza przygodami w wieży możemy też poznać ich fascynujące życie. W zależności od wybranej osoby nasze losy mogą potoczyć się kompletnie inaczej, więc warto zdecydować się na kilka różnych rozgrywek, które umożliwiają poznanie książki w całości. Podobnie jak w poprzedniej historii, także tutaj możemy puścić wodze fantazji i stworzyć całkiem nowego zawodnika, z własną przeszłością i aspiracjami. Dodatkowo mamy możliwość urozmaicenia gry, starając się realizować jak najwięcej kreatywnych misji dodatkowych.
Całość jest naprawdę dynamiczna i angażująca, przez co można spokojnie zrealizować grę za jednym posiedzeniem. Ja na swoją pierwszą rozgrywkę wybrałam libertynkę i co prawda praktycznie od razu została aresztowana, ale moja charyzma pozwoliła mi uniknąć niebezpiecznej sytuacji. Potem testowałam także rozgrywkę złodziejką, ale w przyszłości na pewno wrócę, by poznać, chociażby sekrety akolity. Uwielbiam taki format książek za ich uniwersalność i możliwość kilkukrotnej lektury, która niezmiennie zachwyca.
Gorąco polecam wam więc "W mroku wieży". To świetna rozgrywa dla osób w każdym wieku. Jedyny aspekt, do którego mogłabym mieć pewne zastrzeżenia to wielkość czcionki, która rzeczywiście trochę utrudnia czytanie, bo jest naprawdę nieduża, ale nie jest to szczególnie zaważający na mojej ocenie końcowej mankament.
I have been a fan of choose-your-own-adventure books since I was a kid. It was my favorite thing to be able to control what was happening in a book, especially since I wanted to write my own stories. To this day, I still sometimes enjoy picking up these books when I find ones that look interesting. I was intrigued when I saw that Hari Conner wrote this book and had to pick it up. Hari’s graphic novel series, Finding Home, has been one of my favorite things to read online for years, and I wanted to see what else they worked on.
Into the Tower was such an enjoyable experience, and I highly recommend picking it up. It is described as an interactive game in a book. In it, you get to explore the story based on the decisions you make. At the beginning of the book, you pick your character and then make decisions as you would in a choose-your-own-adventure book. There are so many different options, and I only got to some of them while I was reading. I know I will come back to this again and again. It is perfect for both teens and adults who enjoy adventure, fantasy, romance, and mystery elements
*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.*
For the record, I went down every single path, read every single page, made every possible choice (often more than once). This is how I read choose-your-own-adventure books.
So! It's even better than INTO THE DUNGEON - it felt nearly twice as long - and the playable characters had insanely developed backstories (which made the "good" endings very satisfying indeed), and also I can't talk about the princess without spoilers ~but oh my god.~ I pegged DUNGEON as middle grade, but INTO THE TOWER is one hundred percent YA at least. Characters explicitly sleep with each other, the psychological ramifications of murder are explored, and the body horror is... Woof! Very good but also very, you know, horrific.
I was not expecting this but my favorite character was the libertine. They're all wonderful and the thief's anger is so delicious, but yeah, even with the acolyte's Great Library (🤤) the libertine grabbed my heart the hardest.
Basically, I loved this book. And now I need to go lie down.
This is an engaging book! I used to read books like this and I haven't read one since then so this was such a treat. With four characters to play (or make your own) there are a lot of hours of play in this book. I had a lot of fun wandering all the paths to gather up my achievements and see what else would happen. This is an interesting combination of fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and romance all blended together in a wild story. I was excited about the stats element and I thought they would change more frequently, but mine typically stayed pretty static. It's a great attempt to bring RPG elements into this type of book. I haven't built my own character or played in chaos mode with constantly shifting stats, but I've done most of this book and I found it fun. I'm still thinking about the characters and their stories days later. I recommend this one!
This was amazing. It's been too long since I've read a choose-your-own-adventure book. This one was significantly better than the first. I loved how the roles and their backstories were incorporated at "choke points" but there was plenty of opportunity to branch out. I will 100% be doing many more read throughs (as long as I can keep the pages in, remember to relax your books, kids.)
My D&D-loving 11-year-old swiped this from me as soon as it came in the mail. He’s been reading and re-reading it, playing his way through all of the characters, and absolutely loves it. I need to get him Conner’s earlier choose-your-path book “Into the Dungeon”. Highly recommended by my tween!
* Thanks so much to Andrews McMeel for the gifted copy!
I always loved choose your own adventure books as a kid, and now, I've found one for adults!! It's even nerdy with lots of elements inspired by dungeons & dragons! I enjoyed this immensely! I've only played through it once as "the thief," but I can't wait to do more and find all the endings and pathways.
Fun book. Wouldn’t want to read it more than a couple of times because the storylines are pretty long. Many options, exciting encounters, but too much reading to actually want to see all the endings through.
I did the sailor route and got the "true ending" and my god, I cried my eyes out.
Can't wait to binge the rest of the characters and their endings, I definitely recommend this book if anyone wants to have the biggest binge of their life.
I thought the book was really cool-lots of unexpected things and each character you can play was unique-but the physical binding was pretty bad. On my first read, pages started to come out of the binding. It decreased the fun when I could only open the book a few inches and squint.