Games

Fighting Fantasy
Shadow of the Giants by Ian Livingstone

Began a second attempt. It's going a lot better so far.

If I had one criticism (and I don't know if this applies to all books in the series or just this one volume) it's that it relies too much on luck — not the luck of a dice roll (that's fine; that's games for you), but in terms of what choices you make. This is partly a limitation of the format (unless the book were huge, only so many choices can be meaningful), but there don't seem to be any overriding principles to help decisionmaking.

For example, it could be that you should always talk to people because it will always lead somewhere, or that you should never talk to people because they'll always scam you — but both of those things happen, and it's pure luck which choice will benefit you at any moment. I'd be ok with that if there was always a 'save', but quite often an incorrect choice either hobbles you or leads to permadeath.

I can see why "most people" (anecdotally) resort to marking points of divergence and going back a step or two (or three or four, maybe) if things go sour. It's no worse than saving in a computer game, really, and a lot less time consuming than starting the whole thing over because you made one wrong decision deep, deep into the story.