Are Role-Playing Choose Your Own Adventure Games the Future of Romance and Fantasy?

[image description: a castle in the dawn fog after a rain.]

The other day I was talking to my friend Jessica and she was telling me how much reading she’s been doing lately thanks to audiobooks and reading apps on her phone. I asked what apps she meant, thinking library apps like Libby and OverDrive, but what she told me blew my mind.

Maybe the rest of the world already knows this and I’m just a Luddite who’s just now finding out, but apparently, there are a handful of apps where you can play role-playing games that are “choose your own adventure” stories. The apps I found mostly focused on romance and fantasy. Jessica said she’d tried a few and liked Choices by Pixelberry Studios best, so I gave it a whirl.

First, I should say that I don’t normally read ebooks (or much of anything) on my phone because I’m tethered to my computer all day for work and that’s about as much screen time as I can handle. However, I have read an experimental novel in an app before. I talked about reading The Silent History, which is a serialized novel in a dedicated app with special graphics, years ago. I read the novel on its app, though it’s available in print now too.

As cool as it is, I didn’t really love the idea of having a separate app for every novel I wanted to read on my phone should this style become a trend. I think I read The Silent History in 2014 and that was the last time I read any type of ebook on my phone, so it’s been a while. I remember thinking it was an interesting concept, but I honestly thought it was an experimental thing and that reading via serialization app wouldn’t become popular.

But I could be wrong! So I downloaded the Choices app and it started me reading The Royal Romance, which is your traditional romance storyline in that a common woman gets spotted by a prince and they fall in love but he’s got royal duties and doesn’t know if she’d make a proper queen. The difference is that instead of reading whatever the author has chosen, it’s as if you’re the protagonist and you’re given two or three choices on how to react, which influences the course of the story. I could choose to be the sweet girl next door, the head bitch in charge, or the sassy fun-loving one. I could choose to fall for the prince, his friends, or other women vying for his attention.

I was a little worried that there wouldn’t be enough reading. Like the focus would be on setting up every little detail of your avatar/protagonist and being interrupted by ads, but that’s not the case. There are background visuals and the characters have basic facial expressions, so there’s not a lot of exposition or detail in that regard. The plot is driven mostly by dialogue, which I don’t mind, especially since I have a say in where the dialogue goes.

Since you get to choose, you don’t have the experience of getting frustrated with the protagonist and wondering why in the hell they do the things they do. You can also choose to speed up or slow down the action, and make it as steamy or as chaste as you want.

There’s a good bit of reading (I was actually surprised by how long that first book was) which is what I was hoping for. And because the background of the text changes to accompany the changes in scenery and the text is broken up into bite-sized pieces, my eyes didn’t do that thing where they gloss over when you scroll over a long paragraph. What I mean to say is, this way of reading is extremely readable.

The story is serialized in that some books are completely released and others are still being released. And if you’re on the free version of the app, you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can read a chapter for free, so you can’t really binge it. The money aspect is perhaps what I find most different about the app versus straightforward ebooks on your phone. Typically, readers would pay upfront for an ebook and get the whole thing all at once. With Choices, you have to pay for certain choices that might make the story more interesting, such as a secret date with the prince or a swankier outfit that will catch his eye. You also have to pay to binge read if you don’t want to wait until a free chapter is unlocked for you.

Not gonna lie, I generally chafe at paying for things on apps (unless it’s food or therapy) because what you get feels so… intangible. At the same time, I recognize that writers need to be paid for their work (especially since writing is how I pay my bills!) so I don’t think having to pay to make certain choices in the story is a bad thing or dealbreaker. I ended up getting the VIP subscription for $15 a month, which unlocks unlimited reading access, additional titles that haven’t been released to the wider public yet, and a daily allowance of diamonds, which unlock the premium choices you would otherwise have to pay for. They also give you 185 additional diamonds upfront when you register.

You’d think that many diamonds would last a while, but when each choice is between 12 and 30 diamonds a pop, they can run out fast. And if they run out, you pretty much have to buy more because your daily allowance is only 10 diamonds and therefore not enough for even a lower-tier premium choice. I wouldn’t mind paying more for unlimited diamonds because then I wouldn’t feel like I’m being nickel-and-dimed every time I want to take the story in a more interesting direction.

Again, I get that they’re doing this to make money but it’s frustrating on the user experience end. My goal at this point is to ration my diamonds (because some choices you can make are purely aesthetic and others unlock certain scenes or give you an advantage in a future chapter) by only making choices that drive the story forward. I’m planning to binge all the books I want to read (which right now is the Royal Romance series and this other book called The Unexpected Heiress), then cancel. To be clear, I don’t think $15 a month is bad at all for unlimited ebooks, especially considering that they’re fairly long and take a couple of hours to read. What gripes my ass is being interrupted in the middle of a chapter and being asked to spend more money. I’d rather they just charged more upfront for the subscription and didn’t interrupt my reading experience.

Another thing I find annoying is that the book titles don’t seem to be on Goodreads, which is what I use to track what books I’ve read. I’ve been tracking my reading for years, so it legit gives me a bit of anxiety when I’m reading a book that’s not trackable. I imagine they’re not on there because the books are native to the app and not available elsewhere. The app also doesn’t list authors, so I assume they have an in-house writing team that collaborates on the stories together. (I wouldn’t mind hearing how I could get in on that.)

Those are my thoughts for now. If I decide to keep my subscription or if anything changes platform-wise while I’m still reading I’ll keep you posted.