INKY SQUIGGLES

Cold Bath Street by A.J. Hartley  (with illustrations by Janet Pickering ) , £7.99 (UCLan Publishing, 9780995515574) Publication date: 27 February 2018 My rating:   ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Despite appearances, most ghost stories focus on the living and the impact the dead have on them. By the beginning of Cold Bath Street , however, protagonist Preston Oldcorn has already died, his heart and watch stopped forever at 9:22p.m. Part supernatural thriller, part mystery, Cold Bath Street is pacey and engaging, drawing the reader in with an unpredictable plot and warmly drawn characters. Hartley casts Preston as a relatable young boy who, like many of us, wishes he'd spoken up for himself more often. Unfortunately, it takes his untimely death to jolt him with this realisation. The extraordinary circumstances in which he finds himself see him face many of the usual worries and desires of a teenager alongside the dawning realisation that he will never again get to act on any of them. Some...

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door — Only this, and nothing more.' – 'The Raven', Edgar Allen Poe After spending several years of my early childhood sharing a bedroom with two brothers, coming into a bedroom all of my own was a momentous event. It might have been little more than a glorified closet with hot-pink pebbledash walls (a misguided effort by my parents to designate it the 'girl's' room), but for the first time I had my own space. I filled the little shelves in my space-saving cabin bed with Choose Your Own Adventure and Goosebumps books carefully curated from local charity shops and hunkered in the cubby hole under my desk with friends conspiratorially as though it were a secret hideout. Apparently drunk on the sudden power of establishing my tiny empire, on my first day in residence, ...

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Jane Jensen , $6.99 (Roc, 9780451456212) Publication date: 1 December 1998 My rating:  ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Just as Gabriel Knight is finally settling into his ancestral home in Germany, he is called upon in his role as schattenjagger, or "shadow hunter", to help solve the savage killing of a young girl. The authorities claim it was a wolf escaped from the zoo, but the townspeople say it is a werewolf. Gabriel soon becomes certain the answer lies within an exclusive hunting club in Munich that celebrates the nature of the beast. As his loyal assistant Grace delves into the past to discover the truth, Gabriel finds himself ensnared in a sinister trap, in which the beast within himself becomes the greatest threat of all! I found a digital copy of this as it turns out the paperback is near-impossible to acquire these days. I wasn't expecting much in the way of literary merit, simply a way to get my Gabriel Knight fix having exhausted man...

Touted as the spiritual successor to Gabriel Knight , I really wanted to love this. An intriguing murder mystery/supernatural crossover setup, a strong female lead and Jane Jensen as a story consultant; this has a lot going for it. However, I never really felt that this had the heart that some of the best adventure games have, such as the Gabriel Knight and Blackwell series. You're plunged into the action from the get-go, but I missed those quieter, reflective moments that give more insight into the characters through idle chit-chat, relationship building and even the protagonist's home space. You never visit Erica's home (the closest thing is her work desk  –  this tells you something about her, but nothing particularly meaningful) or learn much about her outside of her job/predicament. The other characters are similarly sketchily drawn. Your partner/best friend is resigned to his desk for the majority of the game, interactions with your romantic interest don't...

Enter if you will, gentle reader, pull up a stuffed armchair by the fireside and join me in a true tale of small-town terror. As young teenagers, one of the biggest and most important obstacles my friends and I faced was convincing all our parents to allow us to stage spontaneous sugar-fuelled sleepovers and backyard 'campouts'. We would listen to cheese-rock ballads on a temperamental Walkman, play pass-the-buck-style dramatic storytelling games, conjecture wildly about our dream futures and generally achieve little to no sleep.

Photo credit: Rick's Photo Thing With  Sarah  and  Lynette SUMMARY Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out – and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse... (Penguin re-issue edition) IMPORTANT TOPICS AND THEMES L: Money – everyone's doing something for money. I think this book is set in the 30s, right? Depression era. So money is pretty high on everyone's mind. And honour – family honour and Marlowe's own honour code, which I thought was interesting; he's an honourable man even with his 'dirty' work. S: Ooh, I like those. I thought that, too – it's interesting that Marlowe is shown to not just be in his job for the money and h...

The most striking part of the 20th Anniversary Edition is the transformation into polished HD graphics. The moody, detailed environments – one of the game's greatest strengths – truly shine in the re-release, enabling Jane Jensen's vision of the New Orleans locales to be fully realised. Robert Holmes' remastered soundtrack is more stirring than ever. Additionally, the rerecorded voices are strong and don't jar with my recollections of the characters – a concern when I discovered the excellent original voice cast (including Tim Curry, Leah Remini and Mark Hamill) wouldn't be returning. Otherwise, there have been slight refinements (such as a helpful new hint system) and additions (new puzzles and scenes), although nothing drastic. The game is, for the most part, faithful to the original, which can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. Although not groundbreaking, the intriguing and well-paced storyline still holds its own (check out my review of the sec...