First thing, I only played through it once. Why? The first time I played through I made the decision early on that meant I could win the scenario, any subsequent playthrough I would just do the same thing, and everything else would depend on the dice, so the replay value isn't there. If you don't cheat and you also don't make this decision, there might be some replay value for you - however, as you discover that the final battle is dependant on whether you made this decision, and you don't even get a chance to roll the dice for the outcome it might not seem worth it.
The style of the scenario is a typical dungeon crawl, giving you dimensional details of the rooms and halls you're in, so you could map out your path as you go through the options. It would be very tedious if you don't investigate any of the doors, as otherwise you'd be wandering through passages for ages. What I like about it is that the entire dungeon makes sense, it's not a random selection of monsters - all the enemies I fought were Goblins. The room descriptions also added some flavour to the scenario, so as far as designed dungeons goes, it's actually pretty good, and you could probably take some time to reverse engineer it.
As far as mechanics goes, it's pre-d20 D&D - simplified. You get 3 stats in your pregenerated character. With the choices I made, I only got to make use of Dex, although I saw a hint of using Wis and could guess where you might use Str. Dex was used instead of a saving throw - since the character was a Level 1 Dwarf (fighter) this was probably a benefit, even with the Dwarf saving throw bonuses I probably wouldn't be doing any better. It also brings up a very important question of while early editions of D&D even used saving throws, when ability checks would work just as well. As far as adventure balance goes, it's quite good, even though I didn't have the best of luck at times, and got my health whittled down significantly a couple of times, I didn't die. Had things gone a little worse on the rolls, or I had made some different decisions, I might have died. That's probably about as it should be, it's unlikely that you'd die multiple times. There also weren't any dick encounters (that I came across) like in Fighting Fantasy, such as resting for the night and getting your rations stolen - who's going to not rest?
Substance wise, there's not much, I'm giving it a 3 since there were a lot of passage descriptions, several times in a row that were unnecessary, things could have been made more interesting. Also, for something that's supposed to resemble a solo RPG, you should be able to fight the final battle by rolling the dice, rather than having the outcome determined by an earlier decision you made. There is of course nothing horribly bad about it either, but I can't call it meaty. Perhaps chewy.
Style wise I liked it. The art was good quality, consistent throughout and actually had a certain "realistic" look (as opposed to the charicatures of Knights of the Dinner table, of which there was an included strip that related to the scenario). The writing was also good, nothing special, there wasn't any terribly engrossing prose, but there wasn't any wasted words with it either - George Orwell will be resting soundly on account of this one.
Should you check it out? Hey, if you're bored and want to kill time for a few minutes (like I was and did) then you might as well. You can download it here.
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