When I was young I read tons of “Chose your own adventure books”. My 2 preferred series were the Lone Wolf series and the Sorcery! series. I liked that in those 2 series you played the same character and you carried your possessions, skills and abilities from book to book.

Inkle Studio

Inkle studios makers of the superb 80 days game has faithfully recreated the whole Sorcery! series and you can experience it on iOS, Android and PC. You move your character on a map:

You battle enemies using a simple combat system:

And you cast spells (that you’d better have memorized)

And obviously you read paragraphs of somewhat well-written fiction while taking choices from your character.

You can even use a nifty gizmo to “go back in time” to the previous paragraph to change a (bad) choice you might have made. I tend to abuse this mechanic which makes the book super long to read for me.

Clairvoyance in books

As a side note, this mechanic reminds me of a good series of books by Benedict Jacka. The main protagonist, called Alex Verus, can see in the future and simulate what effects specific choices would have on his faith. He can use his power to crack passwords (just look at enough futures to know which one is the right one), anticipate combat moves and just know exactly what to say in a conversation to get the most out of it. Exactly like what you can do in Sorcery!

Ink Scripting language

To do their story heavy games, Ink studio created their own “scripting” (as in story telling) language called: Ink. This language and all the tools and plugins are open source and can be toyed with.

The Inky editor allows you to script and to test your interactive story at the same time:

I like it when companies are confident enough in their product to make their tools open source! Now if only Inkle (or anybody using Ink) could adapt the Lone Wolf series…