We're getting close to covering all of the holo-covered Give Yourself Goosebumps books (if you're reading in numerical order this will sound odd) and the last batch I have to cover are all books I'm at least a little intrigued by. This one being perhaps the one I've always raised an eyebrow over. because we have a book about a baby-sitter who appears to be a giant rat. This feels like it could be one of the more inspired books that we've gotten or it could be a case of Stine going too off the rails for his own good. Only one way to be sure. Let's survive the Attack of the Beastly Baby-Sitter.
This cover is awesome. Granted, maybe the warping makes things look a bit too weird, but I still love the angle. How we see our beastly baby-sitter is indeed a giant rat with creepy little red eyes and a just as garish flowery shirt. It's a cool design regardless. Shame our baby-sitter of the book, Zoe, is described as being human and not so much a giant rat... for the most part but we'll get to it. The kid peering through the blinds in fear really sells this cover, giving a bit of dread which a lot of Goosebumps covers honestly don't deliver on. One of the more underrated covers in the series and further proof why I like the work of Mark Nagata.
The player and their six year old brother, who they and the book refer to as "Stinko" are waiting with their mother for their baby-sitter from KidsCare. The girl who arrives is a mousy young woman with a rat tattooed on one of her ears because I guess the mousy part is literal. This is Zoe, the baby-sitter from KidsCare. Not Mary Ellen, the woman who was originally meant to show up. After Zoe gets situated, the phone rings. It's Mary Ellen, who says she was ran off the road. But Stinko says they got a baby-sitter anyway so her services are no longer required. As the player tries to figure things out, Zoe interrupts by pulling a spinner out of her bag. It has the words Fun and Games all over it. And this is the gimmick of the book. On the very last page (not counting the ad pages and Stine's author bio of course) is a circle that represents a spinner, which the book actually has to come back to on a few occasions to determine paths. You have to close your eyes and spin your finger and whatever you land on is the path. So at least there was some effort in the ideas for this book, so that might be a good sign. But what happens when we let fate determine our path? What happens with either Fun or Games? Well, that's what the blog's for so I guess we should get rolling.
PATH #01: ROCKIN' FUN ZONE
Zoe removes a silver disk in her bag which she pulls out. It creates a dome-like structure in the center of the yard. This is the way to the Fun Zone. After the three crawl through a spinning tunnel, they arrive at the Kidscare building, or as the sign seems to suggest, KidScare. As they arrive, Stinko makes a run for it. Before the player can follow, they overhear Zoe telling another girl that she ran Mary Ellen off the road with a giant rat prop. So do you continue to listen, or chase after Stinko? Interestingly, both paths can lead you to a good ending. So we'll start by having the player continue to listen in. However, the player knocks over a boxed filled with Switch Cheese, which is cheese filled with worms that cover the player from head to toe. Zoe eats one before finding the player and chasing after them. The path splits to either heading to the employee area or the Weird Woods. The road to salvation lies not in the woods, so employees it is.
The employee area is actually a laboratory and inside are a bunch of girls in labcoats that look exactly like Zoe. The player tries to hide, but soon gets surrounded by rats that eat the worms off their body. Shake them off or remove them one by one? The answer is to remove one by one. Eventually the rats lead the player into a hole in the basement that is filled with mummified rats. This is the tomb of the unknown rat, which is a weird as hell reference there, Bob. It's a place to mourn the death of rats and to get revenge. The player tries to escape, only for the lights to come up and the sirens to blare. Stand ground in the tomb or hide? The answer is to stand your ground. The ground opens beneath the player who falls down a giant chute. They end up in a lab where half-human, half-rat people are surrounding Stinko, who is strapped on a metal table. The rats grab the player and explain that they were ordinary lab rats who were given human genes which turned them large and humanoid. Because that's how genes work. One of the rats then transforms into Zoe. She tells them that the player and Stinko have perfect genes to become rats, and must eat the Switch Cheese to do so. So will the player eat the cheese or not? The answer is yes, actually. The kids eat the cheese and turn into Rats. Zoe and the others are thrilled as this can turn them back to rats again. They tell the two to eat more of the cheese which will turn them back, and it does. The kids are let go and return home after a weird little misadventure.
Okay, but what if we searched for Stinko? The player finds a bunch of kids at a pool filled with plastic balls called the bottomless ball pit. In the mass of balls is a red cap that looks like Stinko's. But there's also another kid in a red cap heading towards the cave. So ball pit or cave? The answer is the cave. This takes us to Weird Woods which we could have went to earlier in the book. The player finds Stinko's cap on a rope bridge. However, when the player gets on the bridge, it sways so badly that the player almost falls off. Only to be saved by a kid with a hairy clawed hand named David. David says that his current situation was caused by the sitters of KidScare. But before he can elaborate, Zoe and some other people are heading the player's way. So do we follow David or go our own way? The answer is to not trust ol' claw hand over here. The player can choose evading Zoe and the others on the rope bridge or a different path. The bridge is a bad ending (I mean we were due one twist where the player falls to their death) so a different path it is. That being a cave across a canyon. David makes a screeching noise that leads Zoe and the others to the player, but the player manages to leap the canyon and make it to the cave. Inside is another cave entrance, so take that or continue the path?
The answer is second cave spelunking. Inside, a deep booming voice calls to the player. The voice will let the player pass if they answer three questions correctly. But the most important one is the Goosebumps trivia question of the book. What color were the beasts from The Beast from the East? Green or blue? The answer, obviously, is blue. The player is free to go, but is given a cassette tape as a prize that will be useful later on. The player then sees whoever was in the cave had a giant cat paw. Exiting the cave brings the player back to the bottomless ball pit. They arrive in time to see Stinko jump in. So the player has to go in after them. Do we dive in or use the ropes above the pit? The answer is to dive in. The player starts to sink whenever they curl into a ball, but spot Stinko nearby. So stay curled or continue to swim towards Stinko? The answer is to swim for it. The player makes it to Stinko but both are sucked down to the bottom of the pit and through a plexiglass tube.
When they exit the tube they see they're in a cage with a bunch of children. Zoe arrives as the player sees she's half-rat, half-human. Like the previous path, the rats were experimented on and became these half-human hybrids. And they need the Switch Cheese to turn them back. The difference here is that the Switch Cheese can only work if they have an extra ingredient, which is grated kid. The player notices the bars can be slipped through. So does the player do it or does Stinko? The answer is Stinko. But before they can do much of anything, they get caught by Zoe again. So our final path requires if you got the cassette tape or not. If not it's the kid grater ending again, so no fresh twist which kind of stinks, but ah well. The player uses the cassette tape and plays it. It's the sound of cats screeching which freaks out Zoe and the others. This gives the player and Stinko enough time to open the cage and free everybody. They escape from the Fun Zone and leave KidScare behind for good.
PATH #02: DARE TO BE STUPID
So we see what Fun gets us, but what about Games? There's only one good ending in this path, but it also happens to be a rather long path, so I guess that makes up for it. Zoe disappears and in her place is a slim man in a cape. He's covered in strange tattoos and calls himself Dare. He's the games master of KidsCare and has plenty of challenges for Stinko and the player. The first being throwing a parachute up and three three have to get under it before it lands. Getting the right path allows Stinko and the player to make it under the parachute, but they soon find themselves in a strange new place with purple grass. Dare then throws his cape at the kids which turns into a giant tent. The interior of the cape is lined with the tattoos on Dare's body. He tells the kids that they have to play his games. If they win all of the games, they can go home, if not, they'll be trapped at KidScare forever. A box is then placed in the area. But the path we need to take is for the player and Stinko to make a run for it. However, when they leave the tent, they see they're on the edge of nowhere. This takes us to the next mini-game. This time we need a coin and a flat surface to flick it on. If it goes close to the edge, go one path, if it goes over the edge take another. If not, just keep flicking that coin until you get either right.
Lucking out on not sending the coin over the edge leads the player and Stinko into a new area. A white desert filled with hot white sand. Also a sand monster blob. So I hope you have dice on you because it's another mini-game. An even or odd number will determine your fate. Even numbers it is. Suddenly the sand blob starts to suck the kids into the black hole in its body. The path here is to either enter the black hole or try to escape by digging a hole. Either path really doesn't matter. If you enter the black hole, the game just loops back to this scene anyway. The kids dig a hole to escape, but soon find themselves wearing ice skates on an icy surface. Dare then shows up with an ice blaster and turns Stinko into an ice statue. He then points it at the player. The player manages to grab the gun, but now the player and Dare are frozen solid. How do we escape this one? If your guess was another mini-game you'd be correct. This time, take three glasses of hot water and put an ice cube in each one. One representing each character, the player, Stinko and Dare. Whichever one melts first is our path. Which, I will give Stine credit, this one's pretty inspired, but at this point you're just making a big mess.
The player is freed and uses their skate to free Stinko. However, Dare is also freed and chases after the player with one of the snake tattoos on their body. The player manages to evade, so Dare says he'll see them in their nightmares. The kids fall asleep and awaken in a moat surrounding a castle. And in the moat is a fire-breathing dragon. Oh no, we've entered Dragon's Lair for the NES. So do we pull up out the moat or stay in it? Getting out of the moat is the plan here. The kids make it inside the castle, which is KidScare Castle. Dare mocks the kids some more but the player notices there are empty spots on Dare's body. Each of his tattoos are disappearing with each game the kids win. So the next game is for the kids to find their way out. They enter a cave and are surrounded by rats. This leads to another game, this one being a maze page. Get the right path and win, cheat and take the wrong path and lose. The kids escape the maze and run into Dare who gets rid of the living rat tattoo on his hand, which then disappears. But when the player stupidly checks, they get bitten by a vampire bat. They might turn into a vampire, but they can be cured if they guess the right ball that Dare is juggling, which brings us back to the spinner at the end of the book. Red, green or yellow? Which is it? The answer is yellow.
The player is cured of their vampirism and the ball emits a sunlight beam that shows a hidden door. Do we take the door or quit while we're ahead? Taking the door is the obvious call here. The door leads the kids down a tube that takes them to the lobby. Dare is there, his body now mostly nonexistent. Almost all of his tattoos gone. He throws a tattoo of a shrunken cyclops head at the kids. Picking it up just restarts the game, so screw that. Instead the other path has Dare challenge the kids to the final game. All or Nothing. He takes them back to the cape tent which is now almost empty now that almost all of the tattoos are gone. All but one of a beast tattoo on his chest. He has the kids stand on an X and spin the spinner again. Do we land on All or on Nothing? This is a trick. Landing on All means that all of the games are restarted, so Nothing it is. The beast tattoo grabs Stinko who starts to melt into Dare, becoming a new tattoo. However, the player frees Stinko in time and pulls the beast tattoo off Dare's chest. With no tattoos left, Dare vanishes to nothing. The kids are free and head home, but bicker because Stinko is stick of being called Stinko.
We have twenty bad endings in this one (twenty one technically, but it just restarts the story so I'm not counting it). What ones were the strongest and which ones failed? Don't just sit there, baby, let's go.
#01: The player soon sees that the Fun Zone is a giant maze and looming above them is a giant rat with a lab coat and clipboard.
RATING: 3. I like this one. Has a very surreal vibe to it that I don't think a lot of endings really nail.
#02: The player is trapped in the tomb of the unknown rats as hundreds of rats fall on top of them, burying them alive.
RATING: 2.5. Good and freaky. Right down to the detail of one rat falling in the player's mouth.
#03: Refusing to eat the Switch Cheese doesn't matter because Zoe and the others capture the player and Stinko and force feed them the cheese anyway.
RATING: 2.5. Not bad. I mean you're literally damned if you do, damned if you don't in this situation.
#04: The player is caught by Zoe and the others. They try to escape on the rope bridge, but it sways so badly that the player falls to their death.
RATING: 2. Another not bad one, but I was expecting we were at least getting one "fall to your death" ending.
#05: The player gets the Beast from the East question wrong and the Beast emerges from the shadows and eats the player.
RATING: 2.5. Still a better use of the beasts than the actual book. Yeah, I said it.
#06: The player swings on a rope over the ball pit, but slips and falls in the vat of Switch Cheese. As they try to escape, they're blended up into the cheese.
RATING: 3.5. Ah, now that's the kind of dark twist I was hoping for.
#07: A vacuum sucks up the player in the ball pit. They're then covered in a warm liquid and painted. The player is now just one of the balls in the pit.
RATING: 3.5 And we follow that one up with an also freaky twist. Granted, I think the blending is darker but this is still super freaky stuff. This book so far is delivering on the scary endings. I hope I didn't just jinx that as we have plenty more to go.
#08: The player is grabbed and placed on the Kid Grater where they're grated to death.
RATING: 3. Ah, now that's some good old fashioned nightmare fuel right there.
#09: Picking the wrong string on the parachute leaves the player dangling in the middle of nowhere.
RATING: 2. Not bad, just very lacking after the last few we mentioned.
#10: The player and Stinko open a box, but inside is a mirror that traps them inside.
RATING: 1.5. A bit too weird to the point that it comes a bit too out of nowhere to really land with me.
#11: The player and Stinko fall over the edge of nowhere and fall forever.
RATING: 1.5. Suffers from being a bit too predictable. Get better at flicking those coins I guess.
#12: Dare turns the sand into quicksand and the kids sink to their deaths.
RATING: 2. A better screw-over than the previous. Get good at craps, I guess.
#13: Stinko is freed from the ice, but leaves the player trapped forever because they kept calling him Stinko.
RATING: 3. You know what? Justified.
#14: The kids jump back into the moat, only to be instantly fried by the dragon and eaten.
RATING: 2.5. Just dark enough to work for me. Decent stuff.
#15: Taking the cheated path in the maze causes the player and Stinko to be covered in rats.
RATING: 2. Would be more interesting if we didn't already have a covered in rats ending earlier.
#16: Picking the red ball turns the player completely into a vampire bat.
RATING: 2. Again, one of them had to lead to this conclusion so it's not that amazing. The "Fangs a lot" line is cute though.
#17: The green ball turns the player and Stinko into frogs.
RATING: 3. I actually like this one more, mainly for the dialogue on the page. Guess they should have realized it's not so easy being green.
#18: The player opts to quit while they're ahead, so Dare removes their body, leaving nothing but their head.
RATING: 2.5. Earns points for being a decent use of the pun.
#19: The player and Stinko are turned into Rats and forced into their army.
RATING: 2. Eh, another just okay one.
#20: The kids make it to the office of KidScare only to find a message from their parents saying they'll be gone for another week, so that means another week of dealing with Dare.
RATING: 2. Not too bad, but also kind of bland. Not exactly the super exciting ending I was hoping for I guess. Ah well.
BEST TWIST ENDING: HAVING A BALL
WORST TWIST ENDING: FALLING FOREVER
Oh this one was good. This one was very good. Give Yourself Goosebumps is a choose your own adventure style book series. But what those books at their very core are gamebooks. And the best ones try to use the gamebook concept to improve on the interactivity between the book and the player. And we get a lot of that in this series. But I don't think it's ever felt more enthusiastic about the idea of games in the adventure than with this one. Because we get a lot of fun little games and projects in this one. Mazes, a spinner, dice rolling, coin flicking, a game where we have to melt ice cubes to progress. If you're going into these books on the honor system and fully interacting with them, then this might be the best the series has done (to this point at least) in giving the player something to do. And it doesn't hurt that the story is also fun to go through. And yes, I can easily tell which of the two paths Stine had the most fun coming up with, this is really a case where both paths are good in their own way. Stine tried. He actually tried. Or one of his outliners tried maybe.
The Fun Zone path is the weakest, but it still has some great ideas and some fun, dark endings. I like the idea of Zoe and the rat people, which Stine refers to throughout as hippies. Not sure where that came from, I guess Stine was very anti-peace and love around this time? It's a solid adventure and if that was all this book was it would still be a good book. B+ maybe. But the Games path. You can tell that Stine wanted the Games path to be the main event of the book. Dare as a villain is really interesting. A powerful sorcerer covered in tattoos that come to life. I'm guessing somewhat taken from Richard Matheson's The Illustrated Man only shifting the idea into being a games master who uses his tattoos to create deadly games for his victims. And the visual imagery of Dare starting to disappear piece by piece as the tattoos disappear works for great horror. The major villains of GYG are a mixed bag at most. Not all of them can be Sybil Wicked. But Dare is easily one of the best in Goosebumps. Yeah, I consider him a top tier.
So overall, this one was one of the best in the GYG series to this point. The horror works, the book really tries to have fun with its concept, has a lot of interactive ideas to it which makes it feel like a gamebook, and has two paths that are great in their own ways. Wicked Wax Museum is still the upper echelon of GYG books, but this one comes close. Its only fault really being that there aren't much for super wild dark twists and some sort of blend into one another. But that issue aside, this one is one of the easiest recommends I've ever given for this blog. Attack of the Beastly Baby-Sitter gets an A.
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