Sons of Uruzime Review

Developer: Tin Man Games
Price: $2.99
Version Reviewed: 1.5
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

Graphics / Sound Rating:
Game Controls Rating:
Gameplay Rating:
Re-use / Replay Value Rating:

Overall Rating:

Channelling a heck of a lot of Lovcraftian influence, Sons of Uruzime is a fairly dark gamebook adventure from the experts at Tin Man Games. It’s pretty enjoyable too, even if it’s not quite as interactive as some of their other gamebooks.

Starting out, you’re an ordinary teacher going about their day. That is until one of your students mysteriously disappears from within the grounds of Miskatonic University. You soon realise there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. With dark forces afoot, the focus on Sons of Uruzime is all about keeping sane. There’s no combat in this gamebook but there is a heavy focus on keeping your sanity points high.

This relates to a series of decisions you have to make. Sons of Uruzime isn’t short on options, offering plenty of different paths to follow. Besides sanity points, you also use skill points to keep on top of various situations. It’s a much simpler method than anything like what we’ve seen through the Fighting Fantasy series, for instance, however. That correlates with your choice of difficulty levels too, with an option for a free read mode, allowing you to choose whatever you want, or a more challenging adventure mode.

Regardless of what choice you make, the lack of combat means you end up focusing more on the storyline behind Sons of Uruzime, and it’s an interesting one, but it did make me long for a bit more interactivity.

The variety of different paths to take ensure there’s some longevity here, though. I found it pretty enjoyable to see where different paths lead with some ending much more abruptly than others. Sons of Uruzime certainly doesn’t like you to be too passive in your explorations.

It’s quite a change of pace for Tin Man Games so don’t go in expecting fast action, even by interactive fiction standards. But as a relatively inexpensive fix, it’s pretty neat.