- Creatures & Corridors
- The Lab Press
- Written by Brandon Auman
- Illustrated by Andrea Mutti
- Cover Artists
- Hard Cover with Slipcase
- 136 pages
- PG-13
It’s the summer of 1992, and five high school sophomores play a rare role-playing game that was banned for being “too Satanic” – Creatures & Corridors. As the kids play the mysterious fantasy game, it unleashes a curse that warps reality around them: orcs storm the living room, killing their parents. The front yard turns into a moat filled with tentacled horrors. And their basement “game cave” transforms into a literal dungeon, laden with bloodthirsty monsters and terrifying death traps. Now, the kids are forced to play Creatures & Corridors for their very lives, as a devilish Gamemaster judges their every move.
A few months back, I posted a preview for this book. It caught my eye, and just between you and me, I pulled the trigger on buying it because I can’t have enough Bill Sienkiewicz covers in my life. I’m sorry to say that from there, this gorgeous book… hardcover with slipcase and ribbon bookmark… sat on my shelf. Until today. With my morning cup of coffee in hand, I rolled for initiative, pulled Creatures & Corridors from the shelf, sat down in my comfy chair, and ventured on.
From a story perspective, things start out as you’d expect. The kids, Game Master Half Nerd Brian, Jock Wes, Goth Chick Sofia, Full Nerd Jamal, & Alternative Popular Girl Joelle spend a Saturday night around The Table rolling magic math rocks. The conversation turns to an urban legend about a Creatures & Corridors player named Gary Elmore, convicted of murdering his friends and family while claiming that they’d been slaughtered by monsters from the game.
As a fun side note, there’s mention of the Tom Hanks movie Mazes and Monsters (the movie itself, Hanks’s first starring role, isn’t named in the story). Here, it was based on the tragic tale of Gary Elmore, but in reality, the movie was based on the disappearance of James Egbert. The real case was never solved; however, it and the resulting movie fed the flames of the “Satanic Panic,” a thing for which I still hold Tom Hanks partially responsible.
Thanks a lot, Hanks.
Sorry, side-quested you for a second… Anyway, Brian produces an original first-print copy of the game he’d acquired at a swap meet, and reads out a spell that had been written on one of its pages. A strange fog rolls in, orcs attack, violence ensues. A surprising lot of violence, in fact, and I have to offer writer Brandon Auman a high-five for digging in much deeper than he needed to. The book takes off, at times seeming to jump a bit narratively as the group sets off on a quest to make things right again. If I had to offer up one piece of critical thought, it’s that the story’s back half was much stronger, for me at least. There’s a twist that ties the whole book up into a neat little package that won my heart.
Andrea Mutti’s artwork… I have no notes. Zero. He lays it all down on the page with a style that simultaneously captures the real world & fantasy elements and makes it fit. There’s a slightly animated look to his work that almost lured me into a false sense of security and left me unprepared for the pending rug-pull. As the intensity starts to ramp up, the story shifting from romp to horror, Mutti’s artistic flair helps the impact of it all dig in.
At the start, Creatures & Corridors offers up a heaping helping of nostalgia for anyone who remembers what it was like scraping for RPG players in the 80s and 90s. That nostalgia fuels the story… at first… and then gradually gives way as the stakes increase for the hapless group of gamers. If I were reviewing this one in stages, it would’ve started with a solid mid-to-high recommendation as an entertaining way to kill some time. By the end, my interest and enthusiasm for this tale of adventure and tragedy were piqued.
Final Score: 11/13
