Or,
Why it’s okay to Cheat at Gamebooks
We all know it’s not fun to keep having to start again. How were you to know that the pretty lady was a vampire, or the left cave led to the dragon’s lair?
As gamers, and game makers, we do not believe that you should be punished for curiosity (even if you’re lucky enough to be a cat). In choose your own adventures, most of the time you wanted to find all the endings anyway, just to see what happened. You didn’t necessarily want your adventure to end there. Likewise, it’s also not fun to roll less than 10 for your skill score. It’s not fun to roll a 1 and be impaled to your ship’s deck by a falling mast (LoneWolf, I’m looking at you here).
It’s fun to find all the endings. It’s fun to peek down the right tunnel before you choose left. If you aren’t having fun then we have failed.
When making an electronic gamebook, it is easy to enforce a game over screen and be strict with the rules. But do we have to? This is your book, this is your game. It really is your adventure. This is why, when you play BiscuitLand Adventure, you will be able to undo any step you don’t like the look of. You will be given the ability to reverse death and unmake terrible decisions!
You can do with this gift whatever you feel. If you want to start again when your character dies, you can! If you would rather choose the less-fancier sounding restaurant, you can go back and do that too. The most important thing is to play how you want to play and have fun while you’re doing it.