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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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US Edutainment Games of the 90s that Shaped My Childhood: A Retrospective

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When I think of the first video games I ever played, my thoughts gravitate towards titles like Zelda: Ocarina of Time (my first experience of an epic 3D quest) and Discworld (my first taste of maddening moon logic). These games had a profound impact on me; they opened me up to exciting new worlds that seemed, at the time, without limit. These worlds were so immersive and engaging that they remain firmly entrenched in my memory over twenty years later. To this day, the mnemonic 'twenty-three is number one' (the order in which you need to beat a series of deku scrubs in Zelda: OoT ) is more stubbornly etched in my memory than my own phone number. But when I think back further, it's not quite true that this was my first exposure to video games. The nineties and early noughties saw the increased affordability and mainstream adoption of personal computers in both homes and – for the first time – schools. This led to an edutainment (or educational video games) boom, and my UK p
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