La Corne des Sables d’Ivoire (Les Aventures du Pyro-Barbare et de Billy #2)

Although it never made it onto this site, 3 years ago I had written a fairly detailed review of my thoughts about the first book of this series called La Forteresse du Chaudron Noir and I had given it a very generous 8/10. Choose your own adventure books (CYOA for brevity) are a significant part of my childhood reading. I remember going through a few History inspired ones about Aztecs and the medieval ages but what really kicked my love for them into gear was Lone Wolf series. I had the entirety of the starting Kai series and a good portion of the Magnakai series and some of the Grand Master series. The setting wasn’t necessarily my thing, being a mostly non-descript medieval fantasy world but being able to influence the story with my choices was a perfect way for me to satisfy my desire to play something whilst still getting my reading in. Mechanically the series has stayed mostly quite simple, you pick a few pieces of equipment, stats and skills and off you pop, making choices along the way based on what your character knew and/or had and combat was a quick weighted dice rolling experience. It was functional and it let me do influential choices, it’s all that was needed. La Forteresse du Chaudron Noir had however tried to add some complexity and modernisation of the mechanics into the mix.

For the most part I enjoyed some elements as they made combat less reliant on purely lucky dice rolls and the few additional mechanics it added came back frequently enough to not feel tacked on. Nevertheless in my initial review, I had noted that I was giving out this 8/10 based on personal enjoyment way more than on quality even compared to my other scores which are already heavily influenced by personal enjoyment. Bob Lennon is a French youtuber who peaked around 10 years ago with his Skyrim playthrough; his character was freely inspired by Conan the Barbarian but also found a fascination with fire magic thus creating the persona of “Pyro-Barbare” (pyromaniac barbarian). This persona has followed Bob Lennon since then, the character has become him and he’s played as this barbarian in numerous other youtubers’ videos. Bob Lennon unsurprisingly also has a very strong personality, he’s got specific jokes, a specific style of speaking and essentially his own lore which all contributed to his success online. When he announced a crowd-funding for the writing of his first book he went way past his goal of 35,000€ to over 1.8 million euros. The crowd-funding page was describing his love for the old sword and sorcery and CYOA genres and how his ambition was to write a book reviving these, putting your own choices at the core of the experience along with of course his signature humour in the writing and La Forteresse du Chaudron Noir delivered on this.

The book was funny and it was great to get back into a CYOA book especially since the choices did have an influence on the story’s development. I had at the time noted that despite this, the author had clearly struggled with understanding a few of the pillars of CYOA books as these should be constrained to telling what your character can see. Instead odd little remarks like “he smiles behind your back but you can’t see it” snuck in and entire chapters rip the POV away from your character to go on a tangent about whatever the gods of this fantasy world are playing at. This change of POV wasn’t helped that I couldn’t help but not give a flying crap about the story as it was so painfully generic heroic fantasy that it was bordering on being boring so I really didn’t care what the gods’ plans were when they only extended to “I want to protect humans” and “I’m the bad guy”. Thankfully, the book was funny, it was however also the main reason I couldn’t recommend this book to many people because it is only funny if you have nostalgia for the 2010 French Youtube scene. The book is filled with references and winks at other youtubers, French memes and of course Bob Lennon specific lore and as a one time nostalgia fuelled trip it was a good time. However there was one problem: Bob Lennon had announced that he wanted to write a saga of 7 books and I was not a fan of that, as a one-time funny little thing, the book worked, but as a large heroic fantasy saga it needed to dramatically improve the writing quality and the story it was telling. Enter La Corne des Sables d’Ivoire.

The rating up there will have given it away I hated this book. It disappointed me to such a degree that I am completely befuddled as to why or how people are enjoying it. Linksthesun another French youtuber I follow specifically for his book reviews gave it a glowing 5/5 S+ rating saying it was the perfect blend of book and game, and whilst I don’t always fully agree with his reviews and that’s fine I have never reached such a level of disagreement with his opinion. La Corne des Sables d’Ivoire is a really bad book and it is a really bad CYOA game.

The book starts like the previous one with a selection of stats and items and determines what class you are (warrior, crafty, careful or peasant). It then goes into the details of combat which got even more complex, explains the added class special powers and the rules to some dice roll game unique to this world. Even by CYOA book standards, it was a lot but at least I thought it meant that I was going to get a lot of opportunities to use these powers, enjoy the combat depth and I guess maybe play some dice games once in a while like a form of Gwent in The Witcher 3. None of that happened, I managed to go through the entire book without having to do a single combat, never had the option to play a dice game, never used my class’ special power and really…never made any major choices? That last one is what’s gotten me the most upset here, it’s a CYOA book where I didn’t make any choices. A majority of the branching paths aren’t choice based, they are branches don’t get me wrong but they are predetermined. What I mean by that is that most ends of chapters read something along the line of “if you’re a warrior go to number 123, if you’re crafty go to 145, if you’re careful go to 589 and if you’re a peasant go to 364” or “if you have this item go to 478, if you don’t go to 658”. Along the way you also pick up 2 companions which means that into the mix you can add “if your companion 1 is this person go to 785, if it’s that person go to 965” and so on. These aren’t choices, they’re a flowchart but that’s somehow better than the alternative: chapters that simply don’t have a choice. Now, this happens in CYOA books, short chapters that simply give you the quick outcome of a chapter staying below 10 lines of text telling you “congrats you succeeded now you get to continue” or “damn you failed, just gonna have to carry on”. This isn’t the case here however and leads perfectly into the next issue:

The chapters are too bloody long. Again, this happens in CYOA books, some significant milestones deserve longer chapters to set the scene or emphasise your safety but here it keeps happening that chapters are several pages long. CYOA books should be all about choices, you read the situation then you make a choice, rinse, repeat. Describing a situation rarely takes longer than a page and is often shorter since once context is established you can make decisions with relatively little information. Not here though, La Corne des Sables d’Ivoire manages not only to frequently go over several pages for a single chapter but these chapters lead to no choice. Once I noticed this and started counting it wasn’t uncommon for me to read up to 7 (!!!) chapters which only directed to a singular next chapter meaning that I was reading upwards of 15 pages of pure text with no choice whatsoever. If I start factoring in that when branches happened they were simply class or companion checks and not choices then I could go through an entire act without a single choice being made. The book has 6 acts so you can realistically make it through a continuous 1/6th of the book without engaging the decision making part of your brain once, that’s fine and normal for a novel but not for a CYOA book.

But alright then, assuming the book wants to be more seen as a novel, how does it stand up as one? The answer predictably is not terribly well either as it’s still fairly cliché but also just poorly written. The book still wants to be funny and light hearted and so it’s difficult to tell a serious story in it (I’m not saying it’s impossible, some of my favourite comedies tell dark stories, but it is difficult to hit the right tone at the right time). Characters have a significant lack of depth, with most tragically, the Pyro-Barbare accompanying you being a non-stop joke machine regardless of circumstances, it’s like he’s a Marvel character. As such, I didn’t care for anyone particularly, most characters are summarised by one trait and that trait is often meant to be a joke and this includes the gods whose change of POV chapters are still there and still as uninteresting and useless as ever. It is an attempt at world-building but not a very interesting one and the only other world-building piece we have is the dwarves’ culture which revolves around magical laws except when they’re not and making puns around the word dwarf (puns that only work in French but it’s on the same level as smurf language puns). There really are no stakes to be found and whilst I can enjoy the lack of stakes (I mean my favourite genre are romcoms, so it’s not like I’m bothered by a guaranteed no stakes story), it is problematic in a CYOA books as what am I making choices for? If everything always turns out, am I only making choices for flavour? Maybe you’d expect me to just ask these questions and leave them open but no I actually have proof that the answer to that second question is “yes” but the explanation is obviously going into spoilers.

Spoiler

A chapter sees you losing your way in a sandstorm whilst chasing the big bad guy and the only two branches of that chapter are “if you have a flare, signal your position with it at number 845, if you don’t go to 652”. I expected this to be a significant branch as I didn’t have a flare, using the flare should allow me to get help and catch up with the bad guy whilst not having it probably meant waiting out the sandstorm or getting lost even more and wasting precious time, but nope. Using the flare at chapter 845 results in gnolls finding your character and escorting you to the city at chapter 500. Not having the flare at chapter 652 results in a Deus Ex Machina where you just happen to run into some horses who automatically know their way back to the city at chapter 500. The possession of this flare doesn’t matter, there are no consequences, your choices don’t matter, just pick what you think sounds good is the message here, it’s Cyberpunk 2077 all over again.

So the writing sucks, the CYOA aspect sucks, what’s left? The humour, the jokes, the Bob Lennon lore charm? Well yes it’s still there, it’s the same as in the first book but that’s become a problem as he’s already made all the jokes, all the references, all the winks at the audience in that first book and those jokes were already 10 years old at the time, it’s time to move on. Reusing all the same jokes all over again makes the book’s humour a bit more predictable and boring as even the unexpected outcomes of jokes turns into predictable puns. It’s more of book 1 but book 1 was enough and even when it seems like the book is going to give you some form of new joke, it slaps you in the face and tells you you’re playing wrong so much so that it even forgets how to maintain story consistency and I wish I were kidding.

Spoiler

One chapter has you stuck in a cave, for once you’ve got a few real choices offered to you, among which are “inspect the fire” and “don’t try leaving, just start a new life down here”. Given that I wasn’t particularly feeling the main storyline, I thought the new life path might actually lead to some funny events until the narration gently steers back onto the right path but no. Instead in what is the most abrupt shift in tone, the new life chapter is a grim depressing chapter about your character losing its sanity, the barbarian having died decades ago and your own loneliness slowly destroying what is left of your consciousness, maybe a different choices would have been better, game over. It’s absolutely pathetic that when I find myself bored to death by the book that my one attempt at going down the “funny path” results in the book telling me “fuck you”. Worse though, going back and choosing to “inspect the fire” results in your character noticing a woman sitting by it and having a chat with her. Where was that woman in the “start a new life” path? She just isn’t there which is a baffling lack of consistency on the author’s part.

There really is nothing positive to be said about this book, it’s bad in almost every way and yet, somehow, despite the first book garnering 51 times the amount of money the author had asked for during its crowd-funding, the second book got its own round of crowd-funding again for 35,000€, and again getting over 1.7 million euros. Where did the money of the first book go? Why did he need that much money for the second one again? Where did that money go this time? I don’t know because the author isn’t self publishing, outsourced the drawings to his sister who also isn’t a very good artist (but at this point bad art is just the cherry on top of this tragedy) and the author got royalties off the sales of the first book. I don’t want to call this book a scam especially because the author is a big part of my childhood but I genuinely fail to see how one can get so much money and still need more whilst putting out such a cheaply put together rag of a book. The third book is already planned (obviously), the crowd-funding for it is already complete, reaching once again 1.9 million euros for some god forsaken reason, the plan still is to make a 7 book saga but I’m checking out on this because even if it isn’t a scam, it’s one of the worst books I’ve read in the past 4 years.