Escape rooms have been growing in popularity for some time now, as have play-at-home versions like Unlock and Ravensburger’s Escape Puzzles. Escape Book: The Cursed Temple is an interactive story that brings the concept into book form in a Minecraft-inspired story.

The initial story is simple enough. You are a villager named Runt who has been summoned by the mayor to investigate a gigantic temple that has suddenly appeared from the ocean nearby. Your friend Breeze was dispatched to investigate the temple three days ago hasn’t been heard from since. You set off with your companion – a talking cat named Eeebs – and hope that the evil villain Herobrine isn’t behind all this, but you and Eeebs quickly find yourselves trapped inside the temple. You’ll need to solve many puzzles if you want to rescue Breeze and escape.

The format of The Cursed Temple will be familiar to anyone who read a choose-your-own-adventure book as a kid and will see you jumping around the pages depending on the choices you make and puzzles you solve. There are a few modern twists however such as an inventory page at the back where you can record the objects you find, a combinations page which allows you to combine items in your inventory with those you come across (for example, if you hold a book and come across a desk you can combine them and move to section 26) and a cutout Power Cube that you will need to solve some of the puzzles.

The writing here isn’t great but that’s not really the point of a book like this and kids will no doubt love working their way through the puzzles, especially those still obsessed with Minecraft. If your young explorers enjoy this, a second volume – Mystery Island – is also available.

Having grown up with choose-your-own-adventure books, I was happy to accept this challenge, even not knowing anything about the creators, the franchise it's connected to (Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior), nor the fact there were French originals of those books, and very little indeed about the whole Minecraft (still??) world that inspired the whole thing. Here, then, is my experience of playing this book.

To start with it's an easy progression – if you make a diversion you're immediately back on the one right path – to the temple that's mysteriously sprung from the seas, and which your (not-)girlfriend has vanished while exploring. It's the usual thing, of choosing which paragraph to read following the one you're at, and working round the pages of the book as you also work round the world of the novel to get to the mystery behind it all. The book differed a little from the norm in providing appendices – one was the sheet of things you're expected to find, so you can tick them off when you pick them up; one was a further impetus for choice – "when armed with this, what do you do with it" gets presented in a snappier than normal fashion as a result; and the maps. And the maps were a little bit of a hiccup for me – you get a map to level one of the temple before you've barely opened the volume, but I felt the way the text told you what to do left you needing to be a little too pro-active in following its paths. For a book like this for an audience as young as this pitches, I'd have thought they could have inspired more use of it, and reminders of where it might lead to – if you're on the page for the central hall there's no indication whatsoever you're allowed to go to one of the other places adjacent whenever you damned well pleasy, and it wouldn't dumb anything down to list the possible directions.

What this lack of the usual guiding hand means is that you really do need to map this book out as you go along, drawing up on it all paths you might have taken and writing down what you've got. I do this anyway to make sure I've 'read' all of these kinds of books, but the target audience is again being expected to do too much work. To be fair, when they finish the expected 'work', whether it be deciphering an obvious visual clue, prioritising obvious selections, translating runes, filling in fishy sudokus, the sense of satisfaction will be high. But if you don't look at one map you're never told you've got, why then you'll never get to the end. Without cheating.

So there are pluses and certainly minuses in this. Yes, it pitches young – a lot of the time you end your adventure by being knocked unconscious, and not exactly carking it in a gruesome way, even when you get enveloped in lava. There are no battle mechanics and hence frustration because of bad luck with the dice. But the whole engine of the book, the way it gets the ignorant reader to full knowledge of where it might take her/him, is more than a bit clunky. I think if you ironed that out you have a perfectly serviceable adventure, even if it's full of easy diversions en route to the end, but as it is the guiding hand needed by the target audience is little short of emphasis.

I'm a big fan of Minecraft and I love this book a lot I love the pic a lot and I just love the whole books it was good and I cant wait till it comes out so I can bye it so thank you for weighting a book about this

A Mincraft choose your own adventure. Puzzle solving and many choices and endings.

This book could be very helpful for a child who has a hard time getting into reading. The puzzles to solve and the different outcomes to the story are never-ending.

<b>3.5 out of 5 stars 🌟An interactive <I>Damsel in distress</i> story</b>

<i>Escape Book</i> is a story based in <I>Minecraft</i> word preferably for everyone interested in the game but mostly those aged 8 to 14. It is a 'Choose your own adventure' kind of the book with a pretty complicated system that includes maps, inventory and combining inventory with in-book objects.

Runt, the main character, has a mission to accomplish:
Save his friend - Breeze - who allegedly was imprisoned in a dark temple by Runt's nemesis - Herobrine. Unfortunately, while doing that, Runt was also trapped in the temple with his companion, a talking cat named Eeebs, therefore now they must save not only save Breeze but also find a way out of that dark place.

I read that book along with my son for a few reasons:
• eARC I received isn't a good format for reading that kind of story, scrolling back and forth through pdf pages was both annoying and complicated
• At least two times we had no idea what to do next or whether we unblocked the next part of the book or not
• The reader needs to keep track of their inventory and looks at the map at all times and again - it's complicated with an ebook version

Overall, reading that was an enjoyable family exercise and a good way to spend time together. It's more of an interactive story than classic 'choose your own adventure' and I really appreciate the idea of adding map and inventory. I'd love to read on paper to have even more fun with it.

<I>Many thanks to publisher and NetGalley for the digital ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.</i>