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Choose Your Own Adventure (the books)
First up - things!
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Moving on to the subject of the post ...
After playing and enjoying the Biggles Choose Your Own Adventure thatyhlee so kindly sent me last spring, I picked up a whole stack of the original 1980s CYOA books off Ebay and have been going through them for the last, oh, month or so.
It's a really interesting experience doing these as an adult because it turns out that picking the "good ending" path is easier if you have some life experience to draw upon. (With one exception, see write-ups below.) On the whole, I was expecting these to be less challenging or surprising than when I was a kid, and I was right, but they did genuinely hold my interest, and the best ones were fun not just the first time but also exploring all the different alternate paths.
Favorites:
#49 - Danger at Anchor Mine: Okay, I did NOT expect this one, in which the kid protagonist looks for gold in an abandoned mine near the home of their grandma where they're spending the summer, to be one of the best! But it's incredibly fun, creative and twisty, and best of all, the various paths include a *lot* of plot (my biggest gripe about some of these books was how the paths can peter out early or be very obvious as bad/good endings early on) and some of them recontextualize other developments or give you brand new information that you can only get if you choose the right path, for example that the old lady you talk to in the mine is a ghost - if you don't hit the right path, she just seems to be living down there - or (my personal favorite for sheer LOLWUT because it's so completely out of left field) there's just ONE path in which you find out that Grandma is secretly hiding undocumented families in the mine while helping them start new lives. There's also a path in which you encounter hijackers using the mine for a hideout. Basically, there is a lot going on in this mine.
You also get an incredibly wide variety of different results, including a variety of options for the cop who is hassling Grandma over her unpaid taxes (not how taxes work, but okay) which range from being arrested by him to saving his life, befriending him, and getting a reward that you can use to pay off Grandma's taxes. In fact, the one "good" ending that doesn't seem to be actually possible is finding gold! At least without rocks fall, you die. The only good endings in which you can fix the tax situation are the ones in which you manage to be useful enough to get a reward for your good deeds, and the narrative tends to reward you for talking to and helping people; it turns out the adults in the town are full of information and interesting secrets if you cooperate with them and listen to them. I liked that!
#38 - Sabotage: You are one of a team of agents in WWII traveling through the Alps to free a captured pair of French Resistance fighters. This was another really twisty, fun one that was made fun and surprising in multiple paths because, although the basic timeline stays the same (I think this is a general rule for all of them, you can encounter things in different order but it has to be the same overall world), there are a bunch of different options for where the prisoners are depending on how long it takes you to get through the Alps, and a lot of unexpected things that can happen to you along the way. Unexpected for me in particular because one of your team is a traitor, but I accidentally killed him off early in my first playthrough, so it took me several more playthroughs to realize that he's always going to betray you at some point and any option that involves trusting him will get you in trouble. This one also gives you a lot of genuinely exciting but different "good" endings; you win a lot as long as you don't do anything stupid, which was motivating.
Okay but not great:
#48 - Spy for George Washington: You are carrying a message in the American Revolution. There's some fun spy stuff, but it mostly gets a so-so reaction from me because so many of the paths simply ended too fast. There were some nice twists, but not a lot of complications; you either choose right or you don't, and the right choices fairly quickly drop you into Washington's camp to give him your coded letter.
Meh:
#35 - Journey to Stonehenge: You're camping out at Stonehenge overnight. The big problem with this one is that there aren't very many things you can do, no matter what you try to do, so the choices basically railroad you into a handful of options. You have to go through the Stonehenge circle or nothing happens, there's really only one way to get back, and the stuff that happens when you're there is kind of random. On the bright side, if you get one of the paths where you meet Merlin, you can get him to teach you how to do animal transformation and have some fun mini-adventures.
#53 - The Case of the Silk King: You are investigating the '60s disappearance of a CIA agent in Thailand, who may or may not have resurfaced decades later. Okay so I said there was a book in which making good decisions doesn't really help you? It's this one. There are 19 endings and exactly ONE good ending that I found, and you can basically only get to it by making a number of reckless and unwise choices beforehand, such as not collecting information, refusing your friend's help, letting some rando drug you, and fleeing into a swamp at night. So IDEK. After a while it got to feeling like any decision I made in this one, sensible or not, was obviously going to kill me or land me with some incredibly bizarre ending like "stung by bees until I can't move" or "lost my memory, become a monk for the rest of my life" or "broke my pelvis flinging myself out of a car for no reason." And then there are all the many ways you can die, ranging from floods to getting shot by revolutionaries or eaten by jaguars. On the other hand, this book has some of the most bonkers bad endings of all of them, so there's that, I guess. It was also a lot less racist than I was expecting given the premise; this is, however, a low bar.
#9 - Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?: You are investigating a country house murder, but it turns out that choose your own adventure is not a good medium for a murder mystery, at least this particular one. My interest petered out on this one even before I actually solved the murder. It just kinda wasn't very good, and it was quickly evident that picking up clues from previous paths made other paths less surprising or fun.
•
snickfic's No Frills Friending Meme is still going on!•
spook_me posted their 2023 masterlist (will be added to slowly over the next couple of weeks). So far without anything by me. Hopefully I will get off my tuchus and write something.•
amperslashexchange assignments went out! I hope everyone likes theirs!Moving on to the subject of the post ...
After playing and enjoying the Biggles Choose Your Own Adventure that
yhlee so kindly sent me last spring, I picked up a whole stack of the original 1980s CYOA books off Ebay and have been going through them for the last, oh, month or so.It's a really interesting experience doing these as an adult because it turns out that picking the "good ending" path is easier if you have some life experience to draw upon. (With one exception, see write-ups below.) On the whole, I was expecting these to be less challenging or surprising than when I was a kid, and I was right, but they did genuinely hold my interest, and the best ones were fun not just the first time but also exploring all the different alternate paths.
Favorites:
#49 - Danger at Anchor Mine: Okay, I did NOT expect this one, in which the kid protagonist looks for gold in an abandoned mine near the home of their grandma where they're spending the summer, to be one of the best! But it's incredibly fun, creative and twisty, and best of all, the various paths include a *lot* of plot (my biggest gripe about some of these books was how the paths can peter out early or be very obvious as bad/good endings early on) and some of them recontextualize other developments or give you brand new information that you can only get if you choose the right path, for example that the old lady you talk to in the mine is a ghost - if you don't hit the right path, she just seems to be living down there - or (my personal favorite for sheer LOLWUT because it's so completely out of left field) there's just ONE path in which you find out that Grandma is secretly hiding undocumented families in the mine while helping them start new lives. There's also a path in which you encounter hijackers using the mine for a hideout. Basically, there is a lot going on in this mine.
You also get an incredibly wide variety of different results, including a variety of options for the cop who is hassling Grandma over her unpaid taxes (not how taxes work, but okay) which range from being arrested by him to saving his life, befriending him, and getting a reward that you can use to pay off Grandma's taxes. In fact, the one "good" ending that doesn't seem to be actually possible is finding gold! At least without rocks fall, you die. The only good endings in which you can fix the tax situation are the ones in which you manage to be useful enough to get a reward for your good deeds, and the narrative tends to reward you for talking to and helping people; it turns out the adults in the town are full of information and interesting secrets if you cooperate with them and listen to them. I liked that!
#38 - Sabotage: You are one of a team of agents in WWII traveling through the Alps to free a captured pair of French Resistance fighters. This was another really twisty, fun one that was made fun and surprising in multiple paths because, although the basic timeline stays the same (I think this is a general rule for all of them, you can encounter things in different order but it has to be the same overall world), there are a bunch of different options for where the prisoners are depending on how long it takes you to get through the Alps, and a lot of unexpected things that can happen to you along the way. Unexpected for me in particular because one of your team is a traitor, but I accidentally killed him off early in my first playthrough, so it took me several more playthroughs to realize that he's always going to betray you at some point and any option that involves trusting him will get you in trouble. This one also gives you a lot of genuinely exciting but different "good" endings; you win a lot as long as you don't do anything stupid, which was motivating.
Okay but not great:
#48 - Spy for George Washington: You are carrying a message in the American Revolution. There's some fun spy stuff, but it mostly gets a so-so reaction from me because so many of the paths simply ended too fast. There were some nice twists, but not a lot of complications; you either choose right or you don't, and the right choices fairly quickly drop you into Washington's camp to give him your coded letter.
Meh:
#35 - Journey to Stonehenge: You're camping out at Stonehenge overnight. The big problem with this one is that there aren't very many things you can do, no matter what you try to do, so the choices basically railroad you into a handful of options. You have to go through the Stonehenge circle or nothing happens, there's really only one way to get back, and the stuff that happens when you're there is kind of random. On the bright side, if you get one of the paths where you meet Merlin, you can get him to teach you how to do animal transformation and have some fun mini-adventures.
#53 - The Case of the Silk King: You are investigating the '60s disappearance of a CIA agent in Thailand, who may or may not have resurfaced decades later. Okay so I said there was a book in which making good decisions doesn't really help you? It's this one. There are 19 endings and exactly ONE good ending that I found, and you can basically only get to it by making a number of reckless and unwise choices beforehand, such as not collecting information, refusing your friend's help, letting some rando drug you, and fleeing into a swamp at night. So IDEK. After a while it got to feeling like any decision I made in this one, sensible or not, was obviously going to kill me or land me with some incredibly bizarre ending like "stung by bees until I can't move" or "lost my memory, become a monk for the rest of my life" or "broke my pelvis flinging myself out of a car for no reason." And then there are all the many ways you can die, ranging from floods to getting shot by revolutionaries or eaten by jaguars. On the other hand, this book has some of the most bonkers bad endings of all of them, so there's that, I guess. It was also a lot less racist than I was expecting given the premise; this is, however, a low bar.
#9 - Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?: You are investigating a country house murder, but it turns out that choose your own adventure is not a good medium for a murder mystery, at least this particular one. My interest petered out on this one even before I actually solved the murder. It just kinda wasn't very good, and it was quickly evident that picking up clues from previous paths made other paths less surprising or fun.
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I edited a choose-your-own-adventure-style book for my job once, and it was a really fun challenge, following all the possible paths to make sure they held together. I drew a map as I went along (the more heavily circled numbers are endings) and crossed all the page numbers off a list as I edited them to make sure I didn't miss anything. It turned out there were a few stray unreachable pages - no other pages pointed to them - so I removed them.
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Spoilers for CYOA #12
There's actually a Choose Your Own Adventure book (Inside UFO 54-40) that intentionally included an unreachable page! Someone's posted blurry photographs of the relevant pages here.
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My sister and I are longtime gamebook addicts and the quality can be QUITE VARIABLE. The old-run Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, for instance - the high points included Creature of Havoc and the Sorcery! quartet; a low point of Chasms of Malice, which notoriously was riddled with no-warning sudden death and a bunch of luck tests where the luck mechanic caused your luck to GO DOWN each time you tested it so that in practice the thing was both unwinnable AND unfun.
Sersa Victory has a very modern design aesthetic about giving the reader good cues and so on - some of the actual Choose Your Own Adventure books were, as you note, better about this than others, but the old-run Fighting Fantasy books were generally pretty hardcore NOPE about this ("Do you turn left or right down this dungeon?" with no clues to help you make an informed decision, mainly for "replayability" - but of course now they're competing with Stardew Valley). Her gamebook Tomb of the Everstar Sisterhood uses that aesthetic to good effect, is pretty fast to play, and I liked it a lot; I've got a spare copy sitting around if you want it.
She also seems to have The Coiled Crown gamebook as a free PDF download, which I am deffo checking out, although I personally prefer gamebooks in dead tree.
okay, shutting up now!
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Ooh, that patterns post is excellent! I’ve played around with building Twine games before and always felt like there had to be a more systematic approach, but never actually got around to looking into it. Very useful for thinking about this!
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Okay, I find it impossible to imagine that Harlan Thrombey in Knives Out (2019) was not an homage to this title, but I didn't know it existed until this minute!
[edit] Sabotage sounds great and I am really entertained that you can skip the entire subplot with the traitor by accidentally getting him killed.
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Yeah, on my first play-through I skipped a bunch of early plot by parachuting into the Alps and skiing from there (he tries hard to talk you out of this, and then tries to talk you out of taking the shorter and more perilous path) and I ignored his advice and got him killed in an avalanche. I felt bad about it until finding out on later playthroughs that most of his advice is designed to lead you into traps!
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These sound so neat, thank you for writing about them! Somehow it never even occurred to me that text-based games had a predecessor in the form of CYOA books, but of course they did. Definitely makes me want to try a few!
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As a kid, I never liked CYOA books -- I wanted to follow the book through its story, not be expected to pick options! especially ones that might be wrong! so I would do a path or two and then just flip through the book and call it good -- but I really enjoy this adult's eye view of the various ways they can go, and how they can be more or less interesting along the way!
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