Reviews for Dark Matter

The average rating for Dark Matter based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-16 00:00:00 Michael Sheil helped some

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-31 00:00:00 Steven Wilson This is a worthy companion to the classic dungeon crawl of the same name. For many of us who grew up in the eighties, WPM deferred only to Tomb of Horrors as a classic meat-grinder of a dungeon, designed with that typical Gygaxian illogic which meant there was no particular rhyme or reason to how the challenges fit together. But woe betide the party of adventurers who paused to question the coherence of the dungeon with silly concerns like "how do these monsters eat?" That way lay certain death. No, with a puzzle-n-monster-fest like White Plume Mountain, you just rolled from room to room, conquering each riddle or trap as an individual challenge, and logic be damned. What Kidd does here is provide a rationale for that irrational design, and so manages to one-up the original. The titular dungeon is an illogical mess, it turns out, because it is meant to be so, designed as a kind of crucible to weed out the week and inflexible of mind, so that the few survivor can be...ah, but I won't spoil it. Suffice to say that Kidd turns all the classic 'bits' in WPM to his ends, with a result halfway between TV's "WipeOut" and the best Disney ride you ever went on. As a bonus,Kidd's characters are compelling, with fairly nuanced motives. This is something of a rarity for the word-and-sorcery quest sub-genre, which generally relies on stock characters like The Stalwart Knight and the Stoic Ranger and the Plucky Naive Sorceress. Instead here we get a wannabe-cynic who can't hide his actual heart of gold, a thieving sprite with a foul mouth, and a pyromaniac blanket made out of hellhound hide. Tropes, they ain't. If there's a tiny complaint I had, it's that it takes just over half the book to get to the titular dungeon, but that's because Kidd needs to set up the rationale for that part of the story, so I recognize the narratological necessity. The characters are engaging enough that I excuse that structural decision, and would be willing to seek out another work featuring the same cast.