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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl
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Inspiring Adventure Games That Gave Me Wanderlust: Part 1

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I might be unable to venture much further than the sheep-dotted Teesdale hills near my small hometown due to nationwide lockdown, but one can still dream of broader horizons. One of my favourite ways of travelling vicariously is through adventure games. These often emphasise immersion in another place or time, whether real or imagined, and the best examples achieve this through a combination of carefully constructed characters, mood-making music and fully realised settings. Rather than focus on the characters, who act as the natural faces of the games, however, I'd like to direct the spotlight to lesser-recognised characters – the locations themselves. From sleepy small towns in the Japanese countryside to the far-flung Wyoming wilderness, these game locations have inspired my own travel bucket list and creative writing as well as eased my anxiety during times of high stress and uncertainty (like now). The Longest Journey , Venice, Newport (New York's East Village), US
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