I’m an unabashed fan of classic “choose your own adventure” style gamebooks. Sure, most of my fondness for the genre has its roots in nostalgia, but I still collect them (there are treasures to be found at used bookstores), and I’m continually amazed at just how many different series there were.

From the OG Choose Your Own Adventure books to Time Machine, Twistaplot, Find Your Fate, Endless Quest, Lone Wolf, Fighting Fantasy, and so many more, the 80s were the absolute heyday for immersive gamebooks.

But they’re still around, and there are a number that deserve more attention. In this series, we’ll highlight a few of the books and series that require you to read closely, make decisions, and hopefully avoid a gruesome end.

In 2018 and 2019, Andrews McMeel Publishing quietly put out a 5-book series of novels by Dustin Brady called Trapped in a Video Game. The conceit of those books is that the protagonist gets… well… trapped inside a video game and has to outsmart the game – and the game’s designers – to survive.

So it seems only natural that Brady wrote a gamebook spinoff of the series called Escape from a Video Game, which casts YOU as the protagonist.

And folks, let me tell you, this book is ridiculously fun. Like, it’s WAY better than it has any right to be. I read it aloud to my 9-year-old son at bedtime, letting him make all the choices and solve all the puzzles. Not only was he asking for more each night… but I was all too happy to oblige!

In a nutshell, you get sucked into the “greatest video game nobody has ever played”: Cooper Hawke and the Secret of Phantom Island. The choices, puzzles, items, plot twists, and boss battles you encounter in the book are straight out of a classic platformer, and Brady does an amazing job at making the book feel like a game.

He’s also written the book full of snark and in-jokes for those of us who grew up on games like Tomb Raider and The Legend of Zelda. As a result, The Secret of Phantom Island is a thrill both to read and to play.

Will you make a wrong choice along the way and die? Undoubtedly. But these are video game deaths, so if you make a goof, you simply respawn at the last checkpoint (i.e., the last choice you made). Ultimately, there’s just one path through the book to a single “good” ending, but many of the… ahem, unfortunate endings are hilarious. So you’ll appreciate the short detours.

The Secret of Phantom Island is more than a simple make-a-choice-and-turn-to-that-page gamebook. You’ll be given maps to follow, secret codes to decipher, puzzles that require spatial reasoning, Sudoku-like games to solve, and boss battles that require dealing a certain amount of damage (by making the right choices… no dice are involved in this book).

There are also hidden clues inside the book (on pages almost everyone ignores), and just when you think you’ve reached the end, the book presents you with one final puzzle. Solve that, enter the secret message at the book’s website, and be rewarded with a top-secret additional story.

Be warned, though: enter the wrong code and… it’s never gonna give you up.

Both the 9-year-old and I thoroughly enjoyed The Secret of Phantom Island, and I’m taking the “1” on the spine as a good indication that Dustin Brady and Andrews McMeel have more of these up their sleeves. I sincerely hope so, because reading this book made ME feel like the 9-year-old (though, if I’m being 100% objective, this book is much better than my beloved Time Machine books, which are what I was reading at 9 back in 1987).