Choices: Stories You Play

 

Choices: Stories You Play

Tablet/Phone Game from Pixelberry Studios

If you're Gen-X you'll probably remember the joy of Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were short, fun, and gave you a strange sense of license over reading, which is normally a passive experience. Sure, most of the choices led to grisly deaths, but that just meant I got to use TWO bookmarks like holding an old save game file back in case of emergency. I've always loved collecting and using bookmarks. Total win-win.

Choices is one of roughly a billion apps trying to recreate the experience of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are Episodes and Chapters and Experiences and...I'm really not going to play and review all of them, mostly because that would take time out of playing Choices.

Emily, coming in hot!

Let's talk gameplay! ...yeah, there isn't much, but who cares? It's a reading game. There are a few timed thingies, memory tests, and matching, but these are mostly gimmicks to get to and from the choices. Read, choose, see where your choice led, lather, rinse, repeat.

There are premium choices (this game calls them gems) which mostly center around wearing prettier clothes or getting laid. Not exaggerating--45% upgrade your outfit + 45% getting sensual + 10% misc = 100% of the premium choices. You earn 1 diamond per chapter read or you can buy them with real life money. In a couple of the books there are stats to earn, like prestige or detective skill, that can replace the need for gems on some choices.

The reading tickets are called keys, they replenish 1 every 2 hours, you can hold 2 unless purchasing more with real life money.

Both diamonds and keys are a little easier to come by from other chapter games I've played. There are ads in front of the chapters, but that's common to freemium games. Don't fall for the hacks and cheats promising keys and gems--as far as I know, none are real.

Kaitlyn is a personal fave!

So why is Choices on WonWonC? Because there is a ton of woman on woman content! There are ladies galore to romance, befriend, casually hook up with, and most of the protagonists are ladies. There are the traditional hetero lady hookups, but aside from a couple books, these are not required or put ahead of the F+F options. Speaking to the pan and bisexual ladies: your options will be obscenely plentiful, so get your clicking finger ready. Pun only slightly intended.

There are categories like mystery, romance, fantasy but all of them tend to have some overlap with other genres. The writing is good, very good some of the time, which is remarkable considering many similar games have horrible writing, typos, spelling errors, and absurdly stupid or ham-fisted entries/premises.

The background artwork gets recycled, but that's not a big deal considering you're never actually moving through it. The character artwork also has some overlap, but not as much as you might think. Several of the books have very distinct artistic styles that compliment the content. The books that have overlapping artwork, also have character and location crossovers, which is fun and cute like self-referencing Easter eggs.

The game can be played free, some choices will just be harder and the clothes will be drab, also, the total number of hookups with romantic partners will be drastically reduced. New chapters come out weekly, typically on Thursday for some reason. You can link your account across platforms to continue reading on multiple devices. I personally don't do this so I can have multiple devices gathering gems and regenerating keys and multiple paths through the stories happening at the same time. The choices matter enough to make this worthwhile.

You can find Choices on Android and iTunes--free to download and play.

I give Choices: Stories You Play, 4 vaguely racially diverse character options out of 5