Careful reading rarely reveals any hints for correct decisions in Endless Quest® battle scenes. Each fight-or-flight decision point works like a page-turning roll of the dice. In fact, the authors of these titles could have played through regular RPG campaign sessions (in official TSR campaign worlds) and then simply jotted down their results in hypertext book form. Because, without any clues, standing and fighting might as well have a 50-50 chance of being the right choice.

In defense of EQ, though, one unrealistic aspect of number-crunching combat-systems in solo adventures (such as Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf) is that an opponent's prowess can be immediately gauged by simply eyeing his/her (its?) stats. But for those of us who never had the real-life experience of fighting off dog-men in a spear melee, simply choosing to fight — and going in... uh, "spearing" — might, oddly enough, hit closer to the fear-filled inevitability of a true armed bout.

Of course, EQ books are set in many of the obselete and still classic TSR campaign worlds like STAR FRONTIERS™ (Villains of Volturnus) and TOP SECRET™ (Hero of Washington Square). So, vive la vrusk.

And the authors of Light on Quests Mountain even dedicated their book to England. Indeed, considering the time period in which 'Quests' was written (cold-war, early 1980s), why wasn't an author in the UK inspired to return the favor by dedicating a post-nuclear-holocaust gamebook to the US (nothing fancy would have been needed beyond something like, "To the Americans: Let's keep this one fiction shall we?")?