To Be Or Not To Be (Ryan North, 2015)

[CharlesX]

Has anyone here read the Ryan North books To Be Or Not To Be, and Romeo And\Or Juliet? Ryan North attempted to turn Shakespeare's Hamlet and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into gamebooks. They are by one of the Adventure Time writers and have the series brilliant, out-there humour. I recommend To Be Or Not To Be in particular. The humour comes partly from the juxtaposition of 17th century life, and 21st century mannerisms, and pop culture, and partly from the originality and Pratchett-like cynicism.

   Don't really have criticism or a point, except Romeo And\Or Juliet didn't always grip me quite as well as To Be Or Not To Be did. I'm aware there have been other attempts to do this sort of thing - a Star Wars one in particular - but recommend this book.

[kieran]

I wasn't aware there was a Romeo and Juliet follow up. I enjoyed To Be Or Not To Be, even though I know next to nothing about Hamlet.

[vastariner]

Clever song by BA Robertson...

[thealmightymudworm]

I hadn't heard of Shakespeare being made into gamebooks, that's interesting.

As it happens, there were some attempts to make a couple of the plays into interactive versions during the pandemic. As any theatre that people watched had to be online anyway, there was a version of Romeo & Juliet for which the first part was performed over Zoom, and then the last third (maybe) of the play was shown on a website with several either/or choices. Supposedly there was a sequence of decisions you could make that would have prevented the lovers from killing themselves (sorry, spoilers).

Unfortunately the overall result was crap, largely because in an effort to make it first person they had all the characters facing you and overlapping even when they were talking to each other. That and no set, pretty bad music and the fact that the options seemed pretty tedious made for a pretty bad experience. But perhaps some really talented people could make it work.