📱E-Book Review📱

Moon Knight: Age of Anubis
Jonathan Green

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This is the second Marvel book I've read by Aconyte and so I was surprised to find that this book had a completely different format to the last.
Mockingbird, was a straightforward written story book wheras this one is hugely interactive.

First of all - I absolutely love all things Marvel - my youngest son is obsessed and so that means I am too now. We are fully up to date with all the films and the series that have followed and I have to say that Moon Knight was a recent watch and we loved it!
The combining of mysterious super hero and the Egyptian myths and artifacts etc - absolutely brilliant.
So I obviously jumped at the chance to read this!

When I was younger, I loved to read the "decide your destiny" books which were quite prevelent in the 80's but either because I outgrew them or they just disappeared, I'm not sure.
A few years ago, I discovered a few new ones around that I bought my son and he loved working through them over and over again.

This book has taken this idea one step further (to appeal to older readers too) and combined this decide your destiny style with a more strategy based game (a bit like d&d!)

I absolutely loved this!
A genius way to get those who aren't such keen readers off their screens and into a great book!
This will appeal to so many different people, with differing interests and all ages too.

The overall plot and storyline was great - you are an egyptologist who has to help Moon Knight catch up with an escaped mummy on a mission! Along the way and depending on which route you take, we come across many familiar faces, which was great, who can either help or hinder your journey.

I obviously died fairly early on on my first read - but here's the joy of this. The book hasn't been read and finished - this book can be read so many times working through so many different options and collecting achievements along the way - and each time will be like reading a new story.

I am still to read it and have the perfect outcome.... I think I may be quite a few reads off achieving this still!

I loved that there was a comprehensive explanation at the start of the book (for us oldies who aren't quite as quick to get into the strategy games) and then a section at the back where achievements can be logged as they are collected through different reads - this is so my son!! He's never satisfied on his games by just finishing the story mode - if he hasn't collected every possible collectible, he dives straight back in again! Perfect.

It's a must to grab a couple of dice and a pen and paper to keep track of your health etc - and I was a little panicked by this idea - but then once I got into it, it was really easy to keep track of.

I also worried that reading this style of book as an ebook would be pretty tricky to navigate - but it absolutely was not! It was easy to skip to the right sections using the scroll forwards and backwards - the only thing was the added writing for the back section achievements that obviously you wouldn't be able to tick off - but my son had the idea that we screenshot the pages and use a pen app to log these much easier (🤣 ever the 'lets find the easy route' child! 🤣)

This was an absolute joy to read (over and over again) and I think even when you've perfected the route, you could easily come back to this one later on and do it all over again with the same enjoyment!

One that I will definitely be going out to buy on publication - and I'll be looking for more like this too. This whole series will be hugely appealing to so many!


💕Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for my ARC copy - this is my honest review 💕

Moon Knight: Age of Anubis is a game book that reads much like the choose your adventure stories of old. Instead of just making a choice, this book has you pulling out dice and a piece of paper to keep score as you play as an Egyptologist aiding Moon Knight. The Living Mummy, N’Kantu has stolen a canonic jar from the museum. Now he is traveling through the city using it for a spell to make zombies. Each new flip leaves you with more game play or choices to make in your mission to save the world from darkness and one wrong move will leave you at a dead end. Fun and easy to reread for a new adventure, the book is great for fans of Moon Knight. My voluntary, unbiased review is based upon a review copy from NetGalley.

Full disclosure, I am a huge Marvel fan, and I love Moon Knight. So there was very little this book could do to earn anything less than a 4 star for me. I thought this was a very fun story for marvel fans, even if they aren't acquainted with the character. It was my first book of this type, but I loved it! It was so fun to keep track of the stats and follow the choose your own adventure narrative. A definite recommend for marvel fans and fans of ttrpgs.

Ok so here's the thing. As an RPG fan, I think the IDEA of a Gamebook is pretty cool. The writing is good, the plot is detailed, and I love the CYOA aspect of the book.

BUT... The extra work in note-taking and die-rolling and Recording of Achievements and Bonuses... It's hard to enjoy the plot when you are using to look away from the book over and over. And unless you want to carry dice and a notepad with you everywhere, it's hard to read on the go.

Again, a really cool concept, but hard to follow and all the extra work takes the fun out of the read.

Thanks to Netgalley, Jonathan Green (a really good writer) Aconyte Books, and of course, Marvel Comics. All opinions are my own.

Another gamebook novel this time starring Moon Knight.

I love these books they are so much fun and take me back to being a child with the choose your own path format. With my notepad and dice handy I was ready to start. In this book we are an Egyptologist setting up a new museum display when a mummy comes back to life. We help Moon Knight track down this mummy and stop Anubis.... or we try to.

I found this book super fun and you can spend hours trying all the different paths. I managed to die twice but also unlocked some fun achievements like late night double feature and going underground. The story is engaging and is great if you love the Moon Knight universe, we do have some other Marvel characters appear too, so look out for them :)

If you want a fun, easy-going, choose your own book with some action this is a must.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Aconyte Books for an advance copy of this novel and gamebook featuring one of the most mysterious and difficult superheroes in the Marvel Universe.

I remember in middle school when the Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing game came out. My friends and I nerds to the core, were as excited as we could be about being able to play our favorite characters in our favorite adventures and getting to do it our way. Though there was a lot of fights about who was going to be Wolverine or Spider-Man. I don't remember any of us clamoring to play Moon Knight. Moon Knight was odd, kinda Daredevil, talked to gods, was rich, but drove a taxi. Heck he was a Defender. No one cared who was in the Defenders. Moon Knight's popularity now is really based on a good creative team making the character interesting again. Which is reflected in Moon Knight: Age of Anubis: A Marvel: Multiverse Missions Adventure Gamebook by writer and game designer Jonathan Green. In this adventure the masked vigilante known as Moon Knight partners with a Egyptologist to stop a walking Mummy, a Dark God, and a cast of Marvel villains from destroying the Earth.

The Gamebook idea is similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure story in that the reader is given a variety of options that decide how the adventure unfolds. Each character has certain attributes that will help with challenges that fluctuate during the game, so one will need paper. There are dice rolls that sometimes force the hand of the reader for good and for bad, with an assortment of bonuses and achievements to be unlocked. The rules are very well explained, and gameplay is easy. I suggest even if familiar with this kind of adventure that everyone read the introduction, you will thank me later. The reader is placed directly in the game taking the role of the Egyptologist who is about to have a very long, bad day. The character is putting the finishing touches on their first show a recreation of an Egyptian burial site, when N'Kantu, the Living Mummy arises and steals various objects. The Living Mummy is about to make one dead Egyptologist when Moon Knight bursts on the scene saving your life, but allowing the Mummy to escape. And the Game is now afoot.

The book is not only a very fun adventure to read, it is a tremendous amount of fun to play. Gameplay is easy to pick-up with lots and lots of options for succeeding, and a lot of ways to die horribly. I have not played an adventure like this since the Lone Wolf books or the Fighting Fantasy books. I really enjoyed this, and even after a few games, well a bit more than a few found I was still finding pages I hadn't seen, getting achievements I never had, and dying in bizarre ways. One can really spend a lot of time on this and still enjoy it. There are a lot of cameos from other Marvel characters, which was good. An old school interactive read.

This was my first Gamebook for Aconyte and I want more. The story was very good, enjoyable and well written. Moon Knight was written like the current character, a hanger-on of Khonsu more than a servant. And the game was fun. Perfect for old school gamers and super hero readers, or for children who want more from books, this might be the hook to get them interested.

This book was on my 2023 release radar so I’m glad I got an ARC for it.
At first I was a bit afraid it would be a bit too hard for me to follow the logistic of the game but I got it quickly and I’m having lots of fun with the book so far.

I’ve read similar books with my kids where too many of the options left you dead that I was apprehensive about this one but so far I’m loving the different routes it takes you through. I’ve had different experiences with shorter round of 20 minutes and longer ones of 40. I like how MoonKnight is written and the suspens of the story.

I’m going to have some fun playing it again and again until I win!
I highly recommend if you love those types of books and Moonknight! To play with a dice and a notebook :)

Moon Knight: Age of Anubis

Johnathan Green (2023)

A Marvel: Multiverse Missions Adventure Gamebook

Things you will need to play

Six sided dice, pen and paper

Theatre of the Mind

You may have heard of the phrase, this may be the first time you have come across it, but theatre of the mind refers to the imagination. It’s a popular concept with games such as Dungeons and Dragons, where an adventure, or campaign, takes place, usually, in the players imaginations. If you like your games with visual aids, like video games, or other famous board games, like monopoly, you aren’t alone. However, let me make a case for games which use theatre of the mind, like Moon Knight: Age of Anubis. You don’t need a lot of space! We here at R&R played this together, we could not resist. Adopting the role of Moon Knight and the Egyptologist was much more fun with friends and we played this with: a phone, a pen, a piece of paper and a dice (we used a real dice, but there are plenty of apps that have virtual dice, which are just as good.). No board, no pieces…no mess. There was no trawling through cupboards, searching for the board game, setting up and finding some pieces missing, or that there were not enough chairs. Theatre of the Mind requires less space and the only limit is your imagination. Games like this will appeal to minimalists.

Gameplay

If you have ever read a Goosebump or choose your own adventure book, you will be familiar with the concept. If you have ever played games like, Until Dawn, The Quarry, or Man of Medan, you will know all about choosing your path; the butterfly effect and the choice is yours. The principle is the same, something will happen and you, the player, will be given a choice. These choices will happen via turning to page 64, or 21, or 96. This Gamebook is not meant to be read front to back, but rather sporadically, as you make different choices and decide what you and Moon Knight will do.

Johnathan Green

Johnathan Green is “a freelance writer of speculative fiction, with more than seventy books to my name. Well known for my contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks, and numerous Black Library publications, I have also written fiction for such diverse properties as Doctor Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Sonic the Hedgehog, Judge Dredd, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” (Johnathan Green, n,d.)

Marvel and Moon Knight

Are you a diehard Marvel Fan? I would not class myself as one. I have read several Marvel Comics with a range of characters from: Spider-Man, the Punisher, Deadpool, Daredevil, X-men… and while I enjoy the comics, the oversaturation of the current market leaves a bitter taste on my tongue. We are inundated with films and TV spinoffs, until I have become bored. The marvel universe has gotten so big, that now if you have not watched the previous film, of the last tv show you do not know what’s going on. I don’t like that. Sometimes you just want to sit down and relax, without having to consult your hundreds of pages of notes about the franchise you’re watching. But, that’s where this gamebook turns things around. It’s refreshing to be able to become one of your favourite characters. Maybe Moon Knight is not your favourite character, but maybe Marvel is heading in a new direction. Recently I have seen the release of a few books, and although I did not like them, at least they are trying to innovate. I just hope this new direction is not done to death, as with some of their last attempts.

Fun

This Gamebook was fun! The writing reminded me of a B-movie and at times it was absolutely terrible, but in a good way, like when you’re watching a bad slasher, you can’t help but keep watching, even in the scenes are corny. We found ourselves laughing at the dialogue, because it was just so bad. But we were laughing, we were being entertained and this gamebook knows what it is, it is not a novel, but a game, one that you play. Play, is the key word, you aren’t meant to be examining the writing, or looking for the writer’s meaning, you are meant to be having fun. So although the writing and some of the things that happened were utterly awful, we were still entertained along the way. However, like in any game, it has to have an ending and we found ourselves dying over and over again, as we took new routes and new paths. It did become tedious to go back to the beginning and as we already knew what happened, we ad libbed. We skipped the scenes we had seen before and fast forwarded the bits that had become ‘boring’. We began to “fast forward” on our third run and by our third go, we had gotten further than we had before. We saw new things, heard new terrible dialogue and bad metaphors, and we were enjoying ourselves, but by that time we had been playing for hours. So, if you’re looking to be entertained in this marvel saturated universe, give this gamebook a try.

Conclusion

The writing was terrible, with a rushed feel and there was some laughable dialogue that was so absurd, it was just surreal. But isn’t the concept of heroes and villains surreal in this grey world? People running around in spandex outfits, fighting crime and saving the world? This is not a story about realism, it’s a story that knows what it is and it puts you in the driving seat. Giving you options and gameplay which is engaging and even the bad bits are good, in a B-movie way. You may get bored after doing it again and again, but what game would keep your interest after a few go’s? Marvel are heading in a new direction with these gamebooks, and I would like to see some more characters and more plotlines developed into gamebooks.

References

Johnatahn Green, (n.d). Johnatahn Green Author: About. Accessed via: https://jonathangreenauthor.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html

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A riveting plot, compelling characters and a heart wrenching and suspenseful sci-fi romance. A can't-put-down read!

An intriguing path through a Marvel Comics story - and it is great to see Moon Knight take center stage. A fascinating character and reader-driven book.