Commentary...
All in all, it was a fun book, and it's quite interesting to read. It's nicely written, including small details that adds to the world it's depicting.
On the minus side, the quest is extremely steretotypical for a gamebook. I am not sure if it was because the authors thought there was enough novelty in their books (that are quite long with 540 section in this one) to avoid doing too much, or if they weren't sure it would sell well enough to start the main quest during book 1. As we will see, the 4 next books are one large quest, and there is a break between 1 and 2-5. There is no foreshadowing of the quest itself anywhere (that I know of) in book 1.
Also, the ending is quite linear. There is a possibility to have several side quests at the beginning of the book (the "choose your patron" part, where you can, if you want to make the game harder, disregard all the cues leading to choosing Balhazar and go with Vyl (who is a vampire, as heavily hinted and who prefers to drink your blood than recruit you) and Kalugen (where you start in a different place of the Pits which leads to a different story start until you meet the strange game player in the arena. Also, there are several path after the which (the teleporter let us bypass several of them. But the ending is just one long story once you get the fossilized heart and there is big, IMHO, drop in tension after the anticlimactic battle with Icon. He's supposed to be the end boss... Sure, we fought at 4-to-1, but even if we had a single Warrior character, he'd have 8th rank stats, so he'd do 3d6+1 damage, hit on a 10 or less on 2d6 and have 48 HP, nearly twice that of Icon. A tough fight, but not something impossible at this point.
But the tactical fights are much more fun than classical Fighting Fantasy fights, with the walking order and choice of action really mattering, and special rules making each fight slightly different from the previous one. Despite its flaws, it was a fine book and it is going to be only better from there, if I remember my childhood reading correctly.
