Lower Decks Warp Your Own Way is enjoyable, however is it a sport?

Earlier this week, I lastly crossed a title I’d been which means to get to for some time now off of my studying record: Recent Hugo winner Star Trek: Lower Decks—Warp Your Own Way. (“A book?” you ask, horror in your voice. “But this is a games column!” Read on, pricey reader, learn on.) I’m undeniably tardy right here, for the reason that standalone graphic novel was revealed almost a 12 months in the past. But WYOW had just a few strikes towards me attending to it any sooner. First and foremost, that I’m not an particularly massive fan of the supply materials: Lower Decks, which wrapped up its five-season run late final 12 months, was a enjoyable train in goofing round with Star Trek lore. But it additionally continuously felt too trapped between respect and subversion to get significant with its satire; it’s exhausting to make enjoyable of Starfleet and embrace its fundamental vibe of futuristic optimism. So, why (ultimately) choose up a e book primarily based on its characters? Easy: I’m a sucker for gamebooks, and particularly gamebooks written by Lower Decks comedian author Ryan North.

North, I think, shares my heartfelt devotion to the gamebook kind (which might differ in depth from pretty easy stuff, just like the formally branded Choose Your Own Adventure titles everyone learn as children, up by difficult text-based RPGs that require paper-and-pencil to maintain monitor of the participant’s progress). Several years again, he wrote a series of “Chooseable-Path Adventures” based on the works of William Shakespeare which can be, to my thoughts, a few of the best work anybody’s ever accomplished with the playable e book kind. (I’m very keen on the bit in his Hamlet-adjacent To Be Or Not To Be, for example, the place the ghost of Hamlet’s father can notice revenge is means extra boring than utilizing the everlasting existence/fundamental invulnerability of being useless to do neat stuff, and makes use of his ghostly existence to change into the world’s biggest oceanographer.) As anybody who’s misplaced a day to studying Dinosaur Comics is aware of, North is a grasp of the odd digression, and the power to wrench the story in an odd course for no different motive than pure amusement performs strongly to his strengths as a author. At the identical time, he’s bought sufficient of a puzzle mind to wish to construct little meta-twists into the shape, too. (To Be Or Not To Be, for example, has a CYOA-game-inside-a-CYOA-game, so as to mimic Shakespeare’s famed “play within a play.”) The promise of North writing a gamebook was all I actually wanted to ultimately learn Warp Your Own Way; whether or not I liked the character of Starfleet screw-up-but-trying Beckett Mariner or not, I knew the title would have rather a lot to supply me as an inveterate gamebook nerd.

I used to be fortunately unsurprised by the consequence. Not solely did North (working with illustrator Chris Fenoglio, colorist Charlie Kirchoff, and letterer Jeff Eckleberry) discover a plot conceit (which I received’t spoil right here) that allowed him to jam an improbably big selection of traditional Star Trek threats right into a single story, however I used to be additionally struck by how elegantly the e book itself was constructed. Readers/gamers in Warp Your Own Way will sometimes transfer by a sequence of casual acts, reflecting their rising understanding of why the USS Cerritos appears to maintain getting itself blown up in every wildly numerous path, primarily based on selections as tiny as what Mariner drinks along with her breakfast. Arranging the e book’s pages to maintain these sections (roughly) collectively not solely cuts down on spoilers for later twists, but additionally offers with one of many bizarre little issues that may crop up in a gamebook like this: The distracting glimpses of different pages/selections that you simply get whereas making an attempt to deal with the one you’ve truly flipped to. Because North is aware of that the reader is steadily closing in on the e book’s first massive twist—and has most likely guessed it extraordinarily early on—although, these glimpses of alternate potentialities come off much less like conventional spoilers, and extra as tantalizing glimpses of alternate potentialities. (“What the hell is Khan doing there?” “What’s with all the space gods?” “Was that a Borg?!”) The construction of the e book itself bleeds into the studying expertise, in a means that jogged my memory of Jason Shiga’s groundbreaking “choose your own path” graphic novel Meanwhile. (Although North isn’t concerned with taking issues almost as cosmic, or as darkish, as Shiga did along with his 2011 work.) Later on, because the pagecount diminishes, you end up flipping forwards and backwards between smaller sections, and extra second-to-second selections; it’s an extremely intelligent solution to incorporate a bodily component of page-turning into the e book’s pacing. (I advised you I used to be a nerd for gamebooks, proper?)

All of this formal coolness is along with North’s sometimes glorious joke-writing, which cheerfully pokes enjoyable at each Star Trek and CYOA conventions. If I’ve a critique of Warp Your Own Way, then, it’s merely that it isn’t as strong as I’d like as a sport—largely a consequence of its pretty restricted 200-page web page depend. North and his staff pull just a few intelligent tips with their total construction, most notably requiring the reader to seek out just a few unmarked determination factors to progress to the following “act.” But the precise flow-chart of the e book is pretty easy, each by design and necessity, and discovering the trail to the e book’s “true ending” is an very simple affair. As I mentioned, there’s lots of variance in how far gamebooks can go together with this sort of factor. (Contrast Warp Your Own Way with Sorcery!, which is now truly best to play as a computer game, or Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf books.) But a part of the enjoyable of selecting your personal journey is at the very least faking the feeling that your selections would possibly truly matter, that selecting a path is about greater than merely exhausting textual content prompts (fastidiously holding your pinky holding the e book open to the earlier one in case you selected a useless finish, after all). Warp Your Own Way is a enjoyable, good, comic story, and a breezy, satisfying learn. But I don’t assume I may be blamed for wanting extra of an journey from my Choose Your Own Adventure books.