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Life in Adventure Review: Choose Your Own Adventure Revisited

18K View2022-06-16

The first video game I ever played was text-based. I recall this initial encounter was at my father’s work computer lab. His computer lab was a hot room full of massive, mainframe computers and he set me up at a terminal right outside of that room. He told me about a game where I was lost in a cave, and to find my way out I had to type words and directions on the keyboard. I spent hours playing this game while my father worked, and the whole thing was nothing more than glowing, orange-hued words on black screen—no animation, no HUD, not even a picture or graphics of any kind.

The video game industry has come a long way from those days. Text-based games and visual novels still exist these days, sure, but for me, it seems rather difficult to find one that is worth playing—one that rises above the myriad other digital distractions set before me. Let me say that Life in Adventure is that game.

I am going to preface this review with a caveat, though, because this experience is built a bit differently in that it isn't walls of text, really. There aren't a great many complicated descriptions or multilayered conversations to be found here. It is straight to the point, no filler, just adventure—much like the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the ’80s which were typically breezy affairs that you could read in an afternoon. And, honestly, this kind of put me off at first, as I am used to the intricate type of text-based games where you get David Foster Wallace crossed with a coke-addled Stephen King in terms of backstory and lore, so when Life in Adventure just had me bopping from one heroic journey to the next, it was a bit disarming...but then I just dropped my preconceived notions and went along for the ride. And it’s a pretty lively ride, let me tell you.

This title works a bit differently than most, but certainly has common beats and threads: You randomize a playable character at the outset or make a custom one by paying two gems, which aren't hard to come by as you can unlock them by collecting items (more on this later) or watching a quick ad. The character has several customization options: gender, name, portrait, background, trait, stats, and starting equipment.

The gameplay itself is quite amusing: You move from scenario to scenario where you will have a few options of what you can do, and most of what you choose will give you some experience points that will fill up a bar at the top of the screen. Once that bar fills up, you get that chapter’s ending, which plays out according to the decisions you have made and your alignment. Alignment changes the way people react to you as well as some story elements.

This was all well and good for me at first, but not truly understanding the mechanics (thanks to no real tutorial in the game) cost me a few runs, because I was trying to do everything I felt my character would. I continued to be left on a cliffhanger, because my story would end much too soon. What this means in gameplay terms is that you have to pick and choose what you should or shouldn't react to, and sometimes that means ignoring people or even brushing off children in need. Personally, I thought that this was an unfortunate design choice, because I typically like to play a decent, heroic character; ignoring those in need pulled me out of the experience a bit.

As interesting as this type of gameplay is, it doesn't come without its pitfalls. Because there is very little context to the story many times, there was a certain element (which I won’t spoil here) that kept getting me marked as a “traitor to the kingdom” and killed, all because of a misunderstanding. I kept going down the same narrative route thinking what I was doing was kind when, in reality, I was accidentally setting my character up to be branded as a criminal. This series of unfortunate events could have been avoided had there been more backstory to flesh out the overarching story beats.

There are options to buy gems within the game so you don't have to watch ads to get them, and there’s also a nifty collectibles reward system that gives you one gem per new find (i.e., the first time getting certain equipment, the first time getting a certain epilogue, a new entry in the monster journal, etc.). The easy availability of gems serves to help players afford some of the other options and story paths they might want to explore. There is also a one-time purchase option ($4.49 as I am writing this) within the game called the Adventurer's Guild that adds benefits such as skipping fight scenes, one revive per run, and no forced ads (among other perks), but it does not unlock all of the traits, tales, or backgrounds, so you’ll still need those gems.

Aside from that, I want to mention that the game is best explored by changing the points you add to your character's stats. The most changes I saw prior to buying the background stories was when I let go of my proclivity for building characters in a similar mold. Most games make it so that you aren't exactly free to be whatever you wish if you want to have an optimal playthrough, but in Life in Adventure it is best to explore as many character options as you can as other paths will be opened to different types of characters.

The combat found in Life in Adventure is simple. You get power points by gearing up with equipment that you can purchase with the gold you acquire from completing missions or by the rewards of your adventures themselves. These power points dictate how probable you are to win a fight against opponents, but they are not the only factor, as there's also a twenty-sided die roll involved. If your roll is less than 10 you lose power, and if it's greater than 10 you get a boost/perk instead. Of course, if you roll a CRITICAL 20, it's a one shot kill...but my luck with hitting that number was few and far between.

The game's 16-bit-esque atmosphere is nicely rendered for a (mostly) text-based game, as it has a little animated sequence during battle that lasts a few seconds, a nice HUD, and even some cool pixel art that offsets the text paragraphs to better showcase what your character is witnessing. Even the music is quite pleasant and sufficiently jaunty when it needs to be.

Solid atmosphere, appropriate writing, and engrossing game mechanics all add up to a nice digital complement to the text-based, Choose Your Own Adventure genre. My only real quarrel with Life in Adventure is that at times it feels like the explanations for the in-game choices were intentionally vague and caused me to do something I didn't want or know I was going to do.

Huh. Much like real life, when you stop to think about it...

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Unmemory. Give Life in Adventure a gander if Plug in Digital’s thrilling release was to your liking.

• Choose Your Own Adventure (or one of the many variants) books. Life in Adventure may not attain the cult status of this celebrated franchise, but it attempts to follow a similar formula of player’s choice mixed with high adventure.

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