The Traitors: Interactive Game Book

 

I seem to be on a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure kick at the moment then, what with this and the previous book (well okay maybe two in a row doesn't really make a sequence), but this thick book seemed a logical follow-up to the previous thing. The way I tend to approach these is to make a map as I go -- there are some good analyses of this sort of thing on Emily Short's blog -- but I'm not one for playing through and then going back to the beginning and playing through again, I rather like the pictorial version I make of the branches and how the story goes off at tangents and loops back....

...or in the case of this book, goes off at an almost negligible tangent and rejoins the main thread almost immediately. Progressing through the feel of the TV show isn't really there, because you just have no agency over what goes on -- even when you are seemingly presented with a chance to do things differently, you either are forced back into the thread the books wants to follow, or you die.

Even a key decision point about 2/3rds of the way through is fumbled and you are returned to the main narrative regardless of which path you chose, with a very clunky "If you are x, go to this page; if you are y, go to another page" repeated a few times - this acts to bring you out of the narrative and highlight the big problem with adapting this sort of program to this sort of format -- physical books are just not big enough to allow the branching needed for authenticity.

The only time it really splits off into a beautiful tree in my map is right near the end, and although it works well it just makes you wish that they've taken the route not followed and made it purely an ebook, or an online game, or an app, where they could branch to their hearts content and you as a player could have some real agency over what you are doing.

One small example -- at various points you will be given the choice to go and talk to different groups of contestants -- but when you've seen what they have to say, you are sent to a path whereby you are told what the other groups said anyway. So there's no hidden information, no different narrative develops, it's just the same text in a slightly different order regardless of what options you pick.

Disappointing.