Choose Your Own Adventure (the books)
Oct. 27th, 2023 12:39 amFirst up - things!
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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 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 ( spoilers for book #49 )
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 ( this thing )
#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 ( A spoiler ) 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 ( spoilers for #53 ) 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 ( spoilers for book #49 )
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 ( this thing )
#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 ( A spoiler ) 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 ( spoilers for #53 ) 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.
