Trial of the Clone: An Interactive Adventure!

by Zach Weinersmith, Chris Jones (Illustrations)

Trial of the Clone is a choosable pathway gamebook that allows the reader to make choices, interact with the world, and otherwise navigate through over 500 scenes and thousands of potential pathways. Readers can choose to simply read through the story or interact more fully with the book's game by keeping track of statistics, items, and battles. Readers are incentivized to reread the book many times to explore other pathways or to catch some of the many secrets the author has hidden throughout the book.

The reader plays as a clone who sets out to find his place in the world, solving challenging puzzles and fighting monsters along the way. Weinersmith's writing is characteristically irreverent and satirical, painting a dystopian future world filled with comical, colorful characters and clever surprises. Trial of the Clone is Zach Weinersmith's first full-length book, and is evident of his sprawling understanding of literature, science, logic, philosophy, and technology. Weinersmith is the sole creator behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a daily comic that boasts over 250,000 daily readers and served more than 500,000,000 comics in 2011.

This book is published by Breadpig, whose publisher profits will be donated to Fight for the Future.

Genres: Science Fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure, Humor, Fiction, Ebooks, Gamebooks, Fantasy

282 pages, Paperback

First published July 23, 2012

About the author

Zachary Weinersmith (born Zachary Alexander Weiner) is an American cartoonist, who is best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). He is the author of two other webcomics, the completed Captain Stupendous with artist Chris Jones, and Snowflakes, co-written by James Ashby and also illustrated by Chris Jones. He also founded the sketch comedy group SMBC Theater with James Ashby and Marty Weiner in 2009.

Weinersmith has been involved in writing and drawing comics since his high school years, but he first published on the internet in the late 1990s. His early comics usually had three or more panels, but after 2002, he switched to drawing predominantly one panel comics. He stated in a 2009 interview that he was glad to have decided to draw one panel comics because he felt three panel webcomics had become a webcomic cliche by that time, and that there were almost no decent one panel comics on the internet. More recently, he has drawn a mixture of single and multi panel comics for SMBC.

Weinersmith's webcomic was recognized in 2006, and 2007 with the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Outstanding Single Panel Comic,[3] and received nominations in 2003,[4] and 2008.[5]

SMBC is at heart a geek comic, which nevertheless addresses a broad range of topics, such as love, relationships, economics, politics, religion, science, and philosophy. As shown by the diverse range of blogs listed above, it appeals to many different groups.

SMBC has around 250,000 daily readers, served over 300,000,000 comics in 2010, and is one of the fastest growing comics online (has sextupled in readership since 2008). The comics have been featured on many important blogs, including The Economist, Glamour, BoingBoing, Bad Astronomy, Blastr, Blues News, Joystiq, Washington Post, Freakonomics, and more.

Zach has a degree in Literature and 3/8ths of a degree in physics. He enjoys reading about math, logic, science, history, fiction, and philosophy. His hobbies are space travel, dinosaur riding, and wishful thinking. He currently lives in southern California with his beautiful and brilliant wife.

Note: Zach publishes SMBC and SMBC material under both "Zach Weiner" and "Zach Weinersmith".

Reviews

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice throwback to the Choose Your Own Adventure style stories. Trial of the Clone is conceptually well done though there are plenty of elements that the book probably could have done without. Throughout the book, the reader picks up stats and items in the true RPG style. It's kind of interesting to see the impact of decisions but realistically, this type of stat based system is pretty difficult to keep track of and maintain when casually reading, especially if the reader isn't a person exposed to RPG playing in general.

A fun little book for a pretty specific audience.

[Jesús · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy divertido. Es la primera vez que leo un libro interactivo y me ha encantado. El humor friki y de cultura popular de Zach Weinersmith me gusta mucho y me ha parecido interesante el sistema de objetos y estadísticas. Es más interesante que un libro interactivo estándar de tomar decisiones y punto. Sorprendentemente difícil de llegar al final. 3,5 estrellas sobre 5

[Jvermeersch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool concept: choose-your-own-path novel where battles are fought in roll-the-dice-style (except that here you need to randomly flip pages for numbers, much easier) and your character gathers experience and items based on encounters. Keep post-its and a pen at hand at all times! Very well executed.
The story on the other hand is a mess. Okay, to put it frankly: your character is a total moron and the others even more so. The choices presented are dumb and dumber, the next steps all inadvisable. And this gets worse with each act. And throughout this journey is peppered with jokes about sex and gore.
But did I mention the concept?

[Grayson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book ever written.

Well, okay, it's the best interactive adventure book ever written.

Then again, most interactive adventure books are aimed at 8-year-olds and don't have any dick jokes in them.

Hm.

BUY THIS BOOK! GIVE ZACH WEINERSMITH ALL YOUR MONEY!

(He didn't pay me to say that. I just really, really liked the book. Good job, Weiner!)

[Momchil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the gameplay not very well-balanced (3 stars), but the humor is superb (solid 5 stars). Reading it before going to sleep was a bad idea cause I would end up chuckling in my bed for ten minutes after stopping.

[Chris Chester · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amusing new version of the Choose Your Own Adventure (tm) books from when you were a kid. It's surprisingly hard to actually win legitimately.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

+1 for originality

[Marcus Morrisey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laugh out loud funny! I strongly recommend the app version by Tin Man Games

[Brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun read. The narration by Wil Wheaton in the e-version is definitely a highlight.

[Geordie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Zach Weinersmith. He has a brilliant grasp of humor, the intellectual and subtle, the crass and sophomoric, and everything in between. His webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, is one of the best comics available on line, for both gut busting laughs and deep human insights.

So. About this book... This book is a choose your own adventure where you play a clone with literally no redeeming qualities, struggling to survive and figure out different futuristic challenges. This was just not the best of formats. There is so much fiddly stuff to track if you want to do the book the way it's described. And the feeling is that it's so LONG. Though just over 250 pages, it took me months to get to the end of it. And choosing to make the reader identify as an awful, awful person feels like a witty subversion of expectations, but it gets old really quick.

Weinersmith puts in some rich laughs in the book, and I literally guffawed out loud several times. Unfortunately, deeper into the book, the same gags were repeated over and over. You're a coward, you're homely, no one respects you, everyone does drugs.... these are not riveting punch-lines, and hearing them repeated ad nauseum really drags the book down. There's also the running joke that you have no morals and are working for an inhumane dictatorship. What initially feels like a genius rug-pull on expectations eventually becomes pretty depressing.

While there were some phenomenal jokes, I hope they'll all be excised and used elsewhere someday, because I have no desire to read this book again. Just long, fiddly, and repetitive, everything else Weinersmith has done is vastly superior.

[Peter Derk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is fun as hell. Think about a Choose Your Own Adventure crossed with an easy-to-follow D&D sorta thing.

Oh, and the morality nonsense of CYOA, like when it tries to convince kids to not do steroids, all that crap is gone.

I made it into ACT III where I was killed by monkeys with swords. I was at a disadvantage because I'd learned the "Monkey Fighting Style," which was useless against monkeys.

I also chose to live in a ghetto made of pornography and to kill a lot of people in very cowardly ways. One of those two things is very close to my reality. I'm not saying which.

The big plus is that the book is actually a lot of fun to read. It's funny, and the scenes are quick and give a chuckle.

The big minus is that you'll never read the damn thing, not really, because what are you gonna do, just go straight through, like some kinda animal?

[Alan Castree · Rating 1 out of 5]

An immature mess for inebriated 20 something dudes.

This was like Idiocracy meets Leisure Suit Larry but not as well made, way more random and stupid. The jokes mostly consist of gags like “you have a small penis.” (Har har) or “you poke yourself in the eye because you’re so stupid” (har har).

This book was recommend because I’ve been enjoying other adventure books… “It’s a choose you’re own adventure book but not for 8 year olds!!!” Well, those books for 8 year olds are not only better written and structured, but also much more mature than this mess.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun! Satire of Star Wars and classic scifi, with your character's greed and passive-aggression matched only by his/her incompetence. Bellylaughed a lot, which is unusual for me with books. Sometimes the gags fall back on scat when it gets tired of mocking religion, but I mean that in the best possible way.

[Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a bad book but it never really grabbed me. Similar humor to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. But this is definitely one of his early attempts at writing prose. His later book, Augie and the Green Knight is much better.

[Lorenzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty entertaining and humorous "Choose Your Own Adventure" gamebook.
Pick between three jobs between medic, soldier and engineer, and go forth in a world full of (mis)adventures involving a clone in a scifi world, trying to retain at least a bit of his own dignity (hint: he won't.)

[Carrie Mansfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure-style books (especially the Goosebumps ones) when I was younger and was happy to stumble onto an adult version of these books. I also thought the concept - adding some light RP elements - was a nice twist that helped add to the adult feel.

Unfortunately I think this book had a better premise than execution.

First off, let's touch on the RP elements. They're fairly simplistic - you start out with a small pool of HP and a single point in fighting. Throughout the book you're awarded or lose points in fighting, wits and charisma, with these totals dropping to a base value of zero. Which they will, which is frustrating. The battle system is simplistic enough, a pseudo-random number system where you add your skill to the number at the bottle of a page that you flip to. It works, though it isn't necessarily elegant. There is also some item and aspect management. It'd be nice if it were clearer which kind of items were supposed to be equipped and which weren't. At the end of the day though I think the system kind of falls flat for me simply because honestly...it's kind of a pain. The book includes some template in the front to use, but you aren't going to realistically copy those and when I read books, I tend to be curled up in bed, I don't keep pens and paper nearby for tracking. It ends up being more of a burden than a help. And you may just end up ignoring that part of the book.

Aside from that - since you can pretty easily ignore those elements if you really want to - the other reason the book fell flat is the writing itself. The premise isn't bad (not great, but not awful) but the writing...meh. There is a bit too much of fourth-wall breaking for my taste and the commentary is annoying more than amusing. And at the end of it, the whole things feels sophomoric, like it was written for frat boys. I am not a frat boy. Enough said.

So yeah. I can't really recommend this book. There's an audience out there for it and I'm sure they'll love it, but I stumbled upon this cold, bought it because I was intrigued and then was ultimately disappointed by it. On to the next book.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, so I didn't know about the author before I got this off the App store at a discounted price. Would've skipped it had I known. The premise sounded interesting so I took the bait.

I'll start with the mechanics. The system is pretty simple and for the most part works. It's just that the challenges are pretty unevenly and poorly placed. It is fight-heavy towards the end so depending on how you started, it may be virtually impossible to finish since low fighting skills plus few opportunities to heal plus numerous heavy-hitting foes is guaranteed to make certain paths through the book unviable without the cheat mode. But it is pretty nice that there essentially three approaches (fighter, medic, engineer) you can start from and three different endings you could reach.

The prose itself is quite... something. It's mostly juvenile in a nerdy just-hit-puberty way, filled with crude sexual innuendos and trivialised violence. After dying a few times, you'll realise that the stupid choices are usually the better choice, although this is sometimes flipped and the absurd jokes are usually in the poorer choice. While I laughed at some of these jokes and tongue-in-cheek moments early on, they were far too frequent (something like every other sentence) for me to the point they just become predictable cringing and eye-rolling exercises. It doesn't help that the protagonist, i.e. the reader, is an idiotic dork.

At least the plot comes with a nice twist and and endings that I find satisfying. Too bad the journey to get there was not fun (and yes, I perservered for a couple of playthroughs just so to get a more complete view of the gamebook).

[Matej · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bought this for my tablet with high expectations, as Zach's SMBC is one of my favourite webcomics. Alas, I was sadly disappointed with this gamebook. The witty geeky humor that I love in SMBC is nowhere to be found. It is atrociously unfunny, like a brick in your face. It reads more like a 6 year old child's attempt to impress his peers. Using silly words from Czech language as names for characters and planets and whatnot makes it even worse. The story tries to parody classic Star Wars tropes and at the same time it is completely random. The gaming part of the book fares slightly better, but the choices are as random as the story and you never know which path will lead to death and which will move you forward. The combat is completely uninspired and unbalanced at times and I gave up after about 15th attempt to get through Act 3. Zach really should stick to webcomics.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've never read a CYOA book with actual stats to keep track of and dice rolling. It definitely made it more randomized and interesting, although more work to read, so a trade off. I liked this as an experiment, but the writing was nowhere near as good as his later book, Augie and the Green Knight, so I was a little disappointed.

[Eric]

Eh, not quite SMBC-level, I think. Bit juvenile (but boringly so). Neat idea, though, got some entertainment value from it (in iOS app form). OK but not really worth the trouble.

[Yongyoon · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was funny 35% of the time, but the rest were atrociously bad. The protagonist is mentally retarded, which makes it a gratingly annoying endeavor. The experience gets worse and worse over time.

[Erika]

fantasy, game

[Luis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat entertaining, but not outrageous, as you could expect. Just to spend a few hours.

[Eve O. Spellman]

Don't read it.