"Doctor Who - Decide Your Destiny: Lost Luggage" by Colin Brake

Colin Brake, king of the weak Decide Your Destiny book, returns for one final stab at the heart of gamebooks... sorry, I mean, one final stab at writing one. Lost Luggage is the first book of the series' final batch of releases (to date), and the ninth in the series. The last set of books added historical adventures to the mix, and now this one adds a companion-free Doctor... well, apart from you, obviously. "When the TARDIS goes missing in a busy spaceport, the Doctor and you must race against time and across space to find it, before the Doctor's incredible spaceship is lost forever..." Ooh, Terminal 5-a-like.

It will come as no surprise that all the problems evident in Brake's previous three books are present here too. From the very first entry you're -- here comes my well-worn complaint! -- making choices to direct the story, rather than to direct your character. Perhaps if these were Decide the Story books I'd accept this, but they're Decide Your Destiny, which rather implies you're meant to be directing your character's actions, as far as I'm concerned. That's certainly how these sort of books normally work, anyway, and there's a reason for that: it's more fun. Still, there's little point going over it all again -- it comes up in pretty much every review of this series -- so what of the plot?

Well, there are a couple of branches available. As usual, some make not a blind bit of difference -- at one point the Doctor can either pay for tickets or hitchhike, with either option leaving you on the same set of pages -- while others give you wildly differing plots -- one choice either gave me an engine fire or looting pirates... the second option sounded much more exciting. Something else I've berated before is the lack of consistency of plot when things like this happen, though I suppose it's to be expected when you're choosing a story rather than your actions (it's less forgivable when it occurs in the latter, in my opinion). It's not necessarily a bad story, but the scope of it seems a bit broad for such a short book: trying to squeeze arriving at a spaceport, meeting someone (a choice of two, of course, as this is part of the formula in a Brake book (not mentioned before because I have plenty else to whine about!)), losing the TARDIS, getting transport, a spaceship accident, two different reasons for this (at least), ensuing incidents, and finding the TARDIS -- along with the all the options required to make these things happen -- seems a bit much for 102 sections, as many of the incidents are quite brief. Still, there are space pirates -- that's always cool.

I'm sure regular readers can guess my conclusion. Brake's style of choices sap much of the fun out of playing this kind of book, and when you pair it with an over-ambitious plot (passable, but not as fun as some), you're once again looking at an entry at the lower end of the spectrum.