The Fighting Fantasy Classics (on Steam) added the fiftieth fantasy this week: Return to Firetop Mountain. I discuss my playthrough a bit and give a general review. Spoilers will be marked and/or obfuscated.
It has been a minute since I've played through any of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I think the last one I played was Citadel of Chaos [by my chronology, I've played the most recent ones prior to that]. In early 2025? More than a year-long break.
In fact, I played that one a few times through and one of the final posts before us moving to Belgium and my moving of this blog was to write that up in something like a traditional solo let's play, a project that essentially died due to circumstances.
This week, Tin Man Games released Return to Firetop Mountain as DLC for their quite excellent Fighting Fantasy Classics and it felt like a good time to get back into it. I got out a notebook and played it somewhat slowly and deliberately with each move jotted down [and each failed move marked with an X]. I thought about doing a walkthrough but frankly nothing I will ever do will beat the efficiency of champskees' walkthroughs so...never you mind on that [LGT: Fighting Fanzine, note that it will spoil the whole thing if you read it].
Review and Thoughts [Spoiler Free]
First off, if you play this book "the correct way" — taking whichever old stats you get and then restarting every time you get stuck or die — I would put it at nearly impossible to have a proper good time unless you like a lot of re-reading/playing. You pretty much need high Skill (10+ is heavily recommended) and high Luck (again, 10+) and you need, well, luck...
There are sections in this book which you can lose on something like a coin flip, only the coin might even be weighted towards you losing.
Even outside of that cheese, there are a couple of items that are absolutely necessary to progress which can be relatively simple to miss. You also get a few actions where you might get heavily punished for doing the kind of thing the text gentle nudges you towards.
It has one of my least favorite devices in all of Fighting Fantasy, what I have called the economy vs information problem. Relatively early on you get a shopping trip where you can only buy five items (out of something like 15). For the very first time in any of my playthroughs, I seem to have picked the optimal items on the first playthrough. Usually this mechanic requires me going through at least twice and maybe three times if I get locked out.
Therefore, if you are playing like a good little rules-follower, I would put your chance of success at very low. chamskees put chance of success for a character with max Stamina, max Skill, and max Luck at slightly less than 26% (!).
I no longer play these the correct way. I'm in it for fun. I use a lot of bookmarks. I try out paths I know are bad just to see how it goes. I restart until I get decent stats. I goof around and backtrack. I take notes that look like this:
I try and find all the images to add to the image gallery, find funny ways to die to unlock achievements. Those sorts of things. Playing like I play, now, where experimentation and just trying out all the mechanics is the point: I had a grand old time.
The One-True-Path problem of Livingstone titles is here1, however, there's only one path that I know for sure will lock you out of being able to progress and you are directly told to take the correct path. There are a couple of other spots where you can have a much rougher time or miss an item.
Instead of several deep fake forks in the road, you instead have a score or more of segments where you come to a door and are asked if you open it. Then maybe you get punished or rewarded for your life choices. There's no real way to know unless you just open and pick up everything.2
All Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are a bit of a railroad where only path is the intended difficulty but this one feels less like a railroad and more like an advent calendar where you want to skip around 1/3 of the days.
Do you wish to open the door? There's a box inside, do you wish to open the box? The box has a potato, do you wish to pick up the potato? That, on loop. And, frankly, the potato is pretty evenly split between (1) killing you, (2) having a necessary item buried inside it, (3) having no impact on the game. Well, there is a slightly rarer (3.5): being a reference to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain that has no impact.
Because there are some interesting shout-outs to the original adventure plus a few others. It helps Titan to feel like a vibrant world.
You are fairly rewarded, because of this, to just get out and explore and touch all the things. If you are ok with restarting when you open the wrong door [or, you know, just going back to your bookmark].
Livingstone is also clearly trying to address some of the fairly-samey combat issues here with new twists. Some are better balanced than others. There are a few places where you have to fight d6 of a [generally weak] monster, giving it more a proper random encounter feel.
There's an eye-eating contest which is largely annoying in how RNG dependent it is but it feels new and is a silly glimpse into the world. There's a doppelganger fight which feels really un-playtested. In short, you have to hit a slightly-high-Skill creature and THEN roll doubles before he hits you and rolls doubles. Absolutely unhinged at how much it makes the fight drag on.
The other elements tend to be just as varied and experimental (for better or worse).
There's at least one illustration that is used to solve a puzzle. A few math puzzles. One puzzle that requires you to have noted some details from prior. There are a few segments where you have some resource running out over time (usually your stamina but not always) which seems like it could have been used more often in these books.
The cherry on top is a whole combat based on tracking down multiple clues and using X in the proper Y. Only, what should have been the pay off instead ends up in an exceptionally hard to win fight.
It's just... seeing these innovations also involve moments where you have to get the shopping list right. Open the right doors without opening up the wrong ones. And not rolling 1-4 on a d6 to avoid instadeath.
If you play the non-Steam (etc) version, I'd say just straight up and set your Skill and Luck to 12 and Stamina to 24 [or, you know, 9+d3]. At least on your first few times through. Then once you find out all the puzzles maybe going back and trying it more "legit".
Also note: at least one of the versions of the print book seems to have errors. One of the macguffins isn't numbered [though it is possible to figure it out] and you start with a lantern which actually confuses some of the text in the game.
If you play the Steam version, slap those bookmarks down. Abuse the bookmarks. It's a lot of fun to see how painfully you can die, but you want a checkpoint. Also restart until your Luck + Skill > 21 and neither is below 9. Trust me. If you don't believe me, look up at the chart, above.
Martin McKenna's artwork is absolutely wonderful. Livingstone's prose does some nice wonders.
It's a loving tribute to the series. Just one that is ok with being a bit abusive.
- One-True-Path is here you have to navigate a bunch of text-y passages all alike while figuring out if you took the right branch at the three different forks. And each fork has several passages which seem to be legit. By the end, you might realizes you are missing something vital which required you go back and take a slightly different path. ↩︎
- There is at least one spot where you can miss an item if you do something else first because the text just ejects you from the room. It happened to me the first time I got through the section and I had to backtrack until I figured it out because I had been very thorough. ↩︎