The Cave of Time (Choose Your Own Adventure, #1) by Edward Packard

The Cave of Time (Choose Your Own Adventure, #1) Reviews

• 
  Jason Koivu

  Struck with a touch of insomnia (I'm finally building my deck tomorrow and oddly it feels like Christmas!) I thought, what better time to read the classic first volume of the Choose Your Own Adventure series?
  
  In The Cave of Time you are a kid, apparently with no name, on a hike. You come upon a cave you've never seen before. You venture inside and when you emerge shortly after it is a completely different time, and thus begins the adventure.
  
  The pictures, by stalwart CYOA illustrator Paul Granger, made this one out as if it were going to be exciting. There's a medieval knight, the Great Wall of China, castles, a swamp monster, and in my travels I never came across one of these. I spent most of my time choosing either the left or the right tunnel, and somehow intuitively knowing all the while which one of those lead to the past and which to the future. Go figure. Anyway, here are the outcomes of the adventures I went on last night...
  
  1) Went back to an Ice Age, met some cave people, migrated south and lived out my life with them.
  
  2) Fell down a crevasse, met an old man who complained about being a do-nothing philosopher. Boo-hoo.
  
  3) Left the cave and found the sun burning up the Earth, went back to the cave and ended up at a tropical island populated by friendly, grass-skirted natives, hung with them a while and then tried to get back to the cave, but got strangled to death by a boa constrictor.
  
  4) Jumped a train, found it was carrying Abe Lincoln, chilled with him while he wrote the Gettysburg address.
• 
  aPriL does feral sometimes

  An amazingly fun and hilarious series! I recommend this series not only to the age group they are meant to be for, those from age 9-12 years old, but to everybody else, too! I find them laugh out loud funny to read and I am in my mid-60's. The illustrations are wonderful, and the 40 or so endings that you can pick to end the story are so cutely done. I didn't mind flipping about the books in the series and finding out, depending on the choices I made every two pages or so, how I died this time or if I won or got lost or how I killed my friends or the bad guys!
• 
  George

  You might think, "oh, a time traveling cave, how could this possibly end badly?" well brother, are you wrong! it can end badly in so, so many ways. Like with aliens! or dinosaurs! Time travel is tricky.
• 
  Astrid Lim

  Choose my own adventures is one of my most favorite series ever!!! The adventures, the mysteries, the thrills of choosing something wrong, the uncertainties and possibilities.. I love them all. Lorong Waktu is the first of the series, I've read the translation version and the old school vibe made this book more memorable - i feel sentimental when reading it :) I hope Gramedia will republish this series. I will definitely collect them again and will pass them down to my kid!!
• 
  Karla

  *PopSugar2019 Reto #44: Libro “elige tu propia aventura”*
  
  Me divertí mucho eligiendo diferentes finales, sobre todo el primero que ni tiempo me dieron de avanzar cuando ya me habían sacado del juego xD
• 
  Swankivy

  This wasn't the first Choose Your Own Adventure book I read, but as soon as I discovered that this was a series, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read them in order (even though they are not in any way dependent on reading sequentially since they are independent adventures). In this book, you as the protagonist get to choose whether you go left or right in a mysterious cave, and one of the forks leads to the past and the other one leads to the future. Of course as a science fiction nerd I was more interested in the future, but I read all the endings. I would always tend to make my "actual" choices first and read it once through, then go back and choose things I would never choose so I could find out how it worked out. In this first one, though, most of the choices I had to make weren't meaningful. I preferred being given choices that introduced a moral dilemma or asked me whether I would fight or hide, but in this book we get a lot of "left or right?" and "up or down?" type choices where we have no hint about what could happen, which makes the process of choosing pointless. I didn't like that some of the super-simplistic, silly situations were trying to be awe-inspiring (even as a kid I thought they were hollow). Also, being a little pedant, I had a problem with the premise of a second-person book: They want me to imagine "I" am the protagonist, but they are assigning me an uncle I don't have and past experiences I never went through.
• 
  Alicia Romero

  Popsugar Reading Challenge #41: Un libro "elige tu propia aventura
  
  No puedo decir mucho, mi aventura fue super corta y nada emocionante jejeje
  
  Al menos no me mori jijiji
• 
  Floripiquita

  Estos libros no son para mí.
  
  #Popsugar2019 Reto 44: Un libro “elige tu propia aventura”
  
  
• 
  Nai

  3,5/5
• 
  Weathervane

  First in the series, and a decent book. Unfortunately, it suffers from too-many-endings syndrome, an ailment a lot of the early books had. There simply aren't enough pages for the author to flesh out very compelling storylines. On the other hand, these books have a larger variety of events to take part in. It all comes down to what you prefer. Personally, I find the 20 endings standard found in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series to be the best compromise between choice and plot.
  
  The quality of writing isn't stellar, but it works. The story is cast in a rather mysterious light due to the conservative amount of details. The drawings fit, but nothing amazing.
  
  Pretty forgettable entry on the whole, but still worth reading.
• 
  Alex

  Que original.
  Creo que puedo pasarme horas leyendo libros de este estilo.
  Estaba en una cueva, en la que había dos túneles, decidí ir al pasado y ví una especie de fin del mundo. Volví, con esperanza de regresar a casa, pero terminé en un mar, hablando con una mujer que me dijo que me pasaría la vida entera ahí, que sería inmortal pero no sería nadie. Luego de un rato me dijo cómo volver, y por suerte ¡solo he llegado tarde para la cena!
  
  Relectura:
  Esta vez fui a la Era del Hielo, me crucé a un mamut y terminé en el año 3000 mirando películas viejas.
• 
  Josiah

  This was the first book published in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, and I love it now as much as when I first had it read to me. An atmosphere of mystery and suspense is maintained throughout. It is a treat to go through this book again and again; the fact that it contains more decisions than most Choose Your Own Adventure books boosts its readability. The Cave of Time is an exciting, original story.
• 
  Raquel DanzaLibros

  De mis primeras lecturas de la infancia... La recuerdo con gran cariño porque lo leía antes de ir a dormir y soñaba con ese mundo al que mis decisiones me llevaban... Totalmente recomendable para todas las edades!
• 
  Adam Cleaver

  First time reading the 1st ever Choose your own adventure book, The Cave of Time. And, it was ok. Super simple even for a CYOA book. Didn't really go anywhere, just entered, found I was in the Ice Age then went home again. Not as fun as the cover would have you believe.
• 
  Vicky

  Lo encontré guardado x ahí, en mi casa. Era de mi papá, y me pinto leerlo a la madrugada.
  La verdad, no suelo leer este tipo de cosas, pero este libro me gustó bastante, porque no necesité pensar mucho (aclare que eran las dos de la mañana), y la historia me entretuvo mucho.
  Con respecto a la trama en si, no es mi preferida, pero cambia todo que sea un "Elige Tu Propia Aventura".
  7,8/10
• 
  Monica

  Uno de los libros primeros libros de la series con más soluciones (40 nada menos); aunque las historias no resultan muy largas, no están mal de longitud. Es una lectura estimulante, porqué el recurso de viajar en el tiempo, pasado o futuro, siempre resulta atractiva. En ésta aventura nos encontraremos haciendo de marineros, o conociendo a reyes ( incluso a Arturo), en la prehistória o en plena contrucción de la muralla china, por ejemplo. En el apartado de viaje al futuro, está más delimitado ( y no porqué a Packard le faltase imaginación, precisamente, como se ve en otros libros de la serie basados en el espacio), en ése aspecto, quizá flojea. Añadir que muchas veces no regresas a tu tiempo, a algunos quizá les frustre o no. Supongo que el autor pensó que los que leíamos ése libro queríamos cambiar de época y escenario ( ¿quizá es más adecuado para adultos, entonces?..jeje).
  Un buen libro, sin ser de los mejores, que es entretenido y con un tema siempre atractivo.
• 
  Mark Austin

  Ah, Choose Your Own Adventure, that paper bridge between that 5th grade fantasy map (see my Hobbit review) and my life-changing discovery of Dungeons & Dragons in the 7th grade.
  
  Some of them were great, some punishing, some arbitrary, but they revealed to me for the first time that I could make choices and that they had immediate effect the course on my (fictional) reality. For a kid whose home life felt largely hopeless and inescapable, the empowerment of making my own way by the power of my own choices and facing consequences traceable directly to my decisions, wow!
  
  While day-to-day reality seemed to deal out arbitrary, unpredictable punishments regardless of my actions, here was a place where I could experiment and learn and grow in safety and if I was punished there was always a why.
• 
  Ebookwormy1

  Okay, I was reading another review and these books were mentioned. I know I'm taking a trip down memory lane of Jr. High reading with "Sweet Valley High", "Nancy Drew" and now these. These were great! I devoured them. In the end, Mom wouldn't buy the bazillion set (probably not a bad idea), but I checked them all out from the library. I remember reading it through the first time, then again with different choices and finally from cover to cover to catch it all. Brilliant!
• 
  Guguk

  Ini bacanya mungkin ga se-menyenangkan
  Rahasia Rumah Terkutuk, tapi tetap seru!
  
  Menjelajah gua dan harus milih berbagai pilihan yang kayaknya ga berbahaya, tapi bisa membawamu ke perut monster Loch Ness atau ke masa ketika matahari padam ─=≡Σ((( つ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)つ
• 
  Gayle Gordon

  What fun! I used to love these books as a kid and I ran across it in a box of donations at work. Just had to read it. I went though every possible scenario. A book like this must be hard to write with all of the possible connections and choices. I'd love to see the planning diagram! I might see if I can track down more. I'm hooked all over again and I'm over 50. *Sheepish grin*
• 
  Tom

  This book blew my mind as a kid -- fantasy! science fiction! what-if! -- and was a major influence on my love of reading, interest in science, and all things cool. I still have my original edition from 1979 and recently picked up a few others at a used bookstore. Great juvenile literature.
• 
  Jennifer S. Alderson

  I'd read several of these as a child but never realized there were so many!
  This wonderful series taught me early on there is no ‘right’ answer in life.
  Highly recommended for pre-teens and young adults.
• 
  Alex

  When you find these books in your mom's attic, do not reread them. They're not as good as you remember.
• 
  J. Aleksandr Wootton

  Weren't Choose Your Own Adventures great?
  
  But there weren't really books, were they. More like collections of non-linear vignettes.
• 
  Paloma orejuda (Pevima)

  Pues... partiendo de la base de que no me gustan este tipo de libros... ha sido muy meh.
  
  Me ha pillado una tormenta, me he refugiado en una cueva y me he caído en una especie de estanque. Me ha encontrado un caballero tonto que me ha llevado ante su rey (más tonto todavía). Le he contado una mentira que no se ha tragado, y por eso me ha encerrado en una torre. Torre de la que he escapado saltando al foso. En mi huida me han acogido unos pescadores del lago Ness, después no recuerdo muy bien como llegué otra vez a la cueva esa, encontré un huevo y volví a casa de mi tío. Y allí un científico (nunca os fiéis de ellos) me timó y se quedó con el huevo.
  Y fin... eso ha sido todo.
  
  Pues... 2 estrellas sobre 5, y gracias...
  
  
• 
  The Story Girl

  I used to love the Goosebumps 'choose your own adventure' books when I was younger, but I had never read this series, so I thought I'd give it a try (and I've had it on my TBR for 6+ years, so I thought why not). It was a fun book, but something I would have enjoyed when I was much younger. The completionist in me wanted to go back and read every outcome, but I stopped myself after doing a few, and I'm glad I did because apparently there are 40 different endings. But at least it succeeded in taking my mind off the ending of How to Kill a Rock Star for a while because that book destroyed me.
• 
  Iloveplacebo

  La aventura que he elegido me ha llevado a la muerte 💀, creo. ¡Qué suerte tengo!
  
  Quizás, si me acuerdo, en unos meses vuelva a intentarlo. A ver si tengo más aventuras y menos muerte 🤩.
• 
  Amparo

  Recomendable para cualquier edad. Ideal entre lecturas largas y con ganas de un final inesperado.
• 
  David Sarkies

  The first gamebook of its kind
  17 July 2012
  
  This was the first of a new genre of book, namely the game book, though it came out under the title 'Choose Your Own Adventure'. I remember getting this book and the next book in the series for Christmas one year, and I was pretty much all over them, especially since I loved the adventure games that I had on my dad's computer (this was back in the early 80s). The period in which is was released saw a change in the way that games were being played in that there was a gradual movement away from board games to computer consoles and roleplaying games. However not many people had computers in those days, but craved a form of adventure that roleplaying games could only give for a limited period, so thus appeared the game book.
  I note that Edward Packard came up with the idea while reading to his children. I suspect what happened was that his children, while enjoying the stories, wanted more involvement in the story itself, and as such I suspect he began to develop a way to allow them to chose their path through the story.
  This is a very primitive version of the genre in that the description generally takes up the page and when you are given choices, you turn to the relevant pages. Later we were to see the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks which used paragraphs instead of pages, and were generally a lot thicker, however this book would begin to change the way stories are constructed, that is until computers became ubiquitous and people could now play adventure games in their own home.
  The Cave of Time has you, the hero, and you are a very generic hero so that you could imagine yourself in his place, who while out on a hike discovers a cave, so you enter it and begin to explore it and discover that it will take you back and forward in time. There were numerous endings, and there was no actual correct ending, unlike Fighting Fantasy where the correct ending is the last paragraph in the book. However the endings that you arrive at are all dependant on the choices that you make during the story. One particular ending that I remember was the one where a UFO lands on a prairie and leaves behind a couple of humans, suggesting that this was how humanity first arrived on Earth. Personally if I was going down that route I would be a lot more sophisticated than that namely because I would have humanity as being the remnants of a colony established on Earth and then disconnected from the rest of their people.
  Later the first book in the series would be replaced by another book called the Abominable Snowman, and I am not really sure if I ever read that one. In fact I am very vague about which ones I actually read, though I did really enjoy this one and went out of my way to try and get as many of the others that were available. However there are over 120 of these books and I think I tapered off at around 20.
• 
  Michael

  This was the first of the original "choose your own adventure" books, and I read it not long after it came out. It was an idea whose time had come (role playing games were becoming established as well) - that the reader of the book could become the protagonist and affect the outcome through the choices they made. The books were wildly popular, especially among the target age group (though older folks read them also), and the format has been used and modified many times since. Today, it probably seems odd to kids that there was a time when books didn't let you choose the outcome.
  
  With all that in mind, it must be remembered that this was a prototype, and that a lot of bugs still remained to be ironed out. This adventure centers around a satisfyingly simple device - a cave that mysteriously transports the reader to different eras in history (sometimes the future). But in some ways the approach is too simplistic. The character we play is almost completely generic: we learn at the beginning that he is visiting his "Uncle Howard" near Snake Canyon, where he has hiked alone many times (really, we only conclude "his" gender from the illustrations) and not much else. Presumably this was intended to make it easier for young readers to replace the protagonist with themselves, but the result is we have nothing to identify with in him. Far too many of the choices are zero-sum choices: do you go left or right, forward or back, without any guide posts as to motivations for choosing. Later examples of the genre would improve on continuity as well; this one's most obvious flaw is that one goes from exploring an unfamiliar cave and having some odd experiences to referring to it as "the Cave of Time" without processing the information and coming to a conclusion about the cave's function. Finally, in trying to pack so many possible adventures into so few pages, one is usually left with the sense that none of them are adequately developed. Later choose your own adventures could be said to have plots, this one really does not.
  
  These criticisms aside, this remains a very fun book to read, and one can go through three or four adventures in a very short time, making it excellent for short-attention-spans. It may not be the best example of the genre, but it remains an enjoyable one, and surely holds up well nearly 30 years after its publication, more than a lot of the books that followed might claim. According to the note at the end, the author, Edward Packard, came up with the idea for choose your own adventure while telling his children stories at bedtime, and for that, we may all thank him and his children.