Choose Your Own Adventure is going into adult fiction with their CYOA Unbound series. From their press release:
Chooseco, publisher of the world-famous, bestselling Choose Your Own Adventure® book series, has announced the launch of CYOA Unbound, the first-ever Choose Your Own Adventure imprint dedicated to publishing nonlinear, multiple-ending gamebooks for adults.
The inaugural list—hitting shelves in fall 2027—brings Pride and Prejudice ($19.99, paperback, July 2027), one of the most iconic love stories, into the interactive format. Austen’s classic is being retold by C. Davitt Bell, author of I Remember You, Slipping, and Little Blog on the Prairie. In addition, Chooseco is publishing Culty ($19.99, paperback, September 2027) by Fancy Feast, author of Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques, pitched as White Lotus meets Sex and the City. Both works of fiction will be imbued with the same magic that Choose Your Own Adventure books have delivered for middle grade readers for decades, but with adult-focused narratives and themes. The imprint will be genre-spanning: Forthcoming titles are set to include reimagined classics, horror, mysteries, thrillers, romance, and more.
So it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
Incidentally, my first thought on seeing them calling it Unbound was: that seems like a bad idea given that there’s already a book publisher called Unbound, that put out 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams and John Finnemore’s sequel to Cain’s Jawbone among others, and I was very sad to find out that Unbound went out of business last year. I guess I’m glad I received my orders before they collapsed.
Once again Ryan North was ahead of the curve with his “legally we can’t say choose your own adventure so let’s call them chooseable path” Shakespeare books
If Mr. Darcy’s fancy apparel strikes you as inappropriate for an afternoon luncheon on the peacock glen, particularly on a day as fair and boundless as this, please advance to page 293.
If Mr. Darcy’s sour demeanor and brooding countenance makes him curiously winsome to your eyes—against all better judgement, of course!—you will welcome turning to page 196.
Interesting, these even use the CYOA™ familiar font. My gut reaction is that few grown-ups are going to want to buy these in physical form. Physical CYOA is inherently going to be a brief read - anything substantially interactive that takes longer than an hour to read is going to be a thicc QP volume like a C++ manual or House of Leaves.
Romeo and/or Juliet runs like 400+ pages from source material that usually runs about 100 pages. R&&||J also mitigates page count by using numbered “storylet” passages - you don’t turn to a page, you turn to a passage, and physical pages may have more than one on each. That could be similar to what Unbound might do.
Interactive CYOA Pride and Prejudice lists 448 pages. The first non-interactive listing on Amazon reports 496 pages hardcover, about 7-9 hour read. The time-cave nature of printed CYOA assumes not every page of the book is read. I suppose it’s a classic people will re-read, especially if they know it.
CULTY By Fancy Feast This girls’ trip was not supposed to be a life or death situation. Yet here YOU are, your back pressed against the side of a decrepit farmhouse, praying that your friends read your frantically scrawled escape plan without alerting Shepherd Pax or any of his balayage[1] acolytes.
I do note they mean “adult” more in the sense of “non-children’s books for grown-ups” and not necessarily explicit material.
Choice of Games is ahead of the curve with their Heart’s Choice adult romance side imprint and more titles already. From what I’ve perused the flavors go from vanilla to ghost-pepper.
[NOTE: Heart’s Choice website is SFW, but stories linked from there might include NSFW prose]
Balayage is a freehand hair-painting technique where a stylist sweeps lightener or color onto the surface of random hair sections to create a soft, natural, sun-kissed effect (not at all what I expected this to mean in context…) ↩︎
The font and the red stripe are probably the most valuable assets ChooseCo has, after the “CYOA” trademark itself. It’s not like there’s any particular character or setting or storyline in their archive that beg for a sequel.
I feel like the company has been struggling for relevance for a long time.
For To Be or Not To Be I ended up making a spreadsheet to make sure I hit every node in the book. It led me to discover that there’s a story you can only reach via cheating. The sequels Romeo and/or Juliet and William Shakespeare Punches a Friggin’ Shark and/or Other Stories don’t pull the same trick.
I had no idea CYOA was an extant brand until earlier this year when they had podcasting star Griffin McElroy write one but it’s decidedly targeted at middle grade readers and podcast fans.
I’ve only seen one other gamebook use the tab system: Pick Your Own Path on the Oregon Trail (2020). (Yes, “Oregon Trail” is also trademarked.) I posted about it here: Zarf Updates: Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail
I forgot for a moment that in the publishing market “adult” is used to just mean “not children’s/YA books” and was like “wait they’re making official CYOA branded erotica now?”
