Publisher: Blazing Planet Studio
Developer: Blazing Planet Studio
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: Not Rated
Looking back over the years, I’m kind of astounded at how many games I’ve played that could be classified as “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style visual novels. I’d have guessed it was a handful, not something like a dozen-plus. And yet, even having played all those, I’d still say that Choice of Life: Wild Islands is the closest I’ve come to playing a game that fully captures the experience of reading an 1980s “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel.
In large part, this is because of the way that death seems to wait for you around every corner in Wild Islands. It’s rarely immediate death, to be sure, but it still happens often enough, often in the most unexpected ways, that it really evokes those original CYOA books that thought nothing of killing you out of nowhere.
What makes Wild Islands so fun, though, is how it adapts the CYOA format to gaming. For starters, as I wrote in the last paragraph, the game never immediately kills you. Rather, it gives you hearts, and adds them or takes them away based on your decision. Choosing to swim for shore during a storm, for example, won’t immediately make you drown (assuming you have enough hearts left), but it will knock a few points off your life. Similarly, eating strange berries can also harm you – but it could also be a stroke of luck, and revitalize you while healing your ailments.There are all kinds of choices, and Wild Islands does a good job of making them cumulatively matter.
The other fun thing about Wild Islands is that it streamlines the most annoying part about CYOA books: giving you a chance to rethink your decisions. If you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure, you probably remember using your finger as a bookmark to hold the spot where you made a decision that you weren’t sure about. When you die in Wild Islands, the game brings you back to your last critical decision, giving you an opportunity to rethink the whole process that led to your death. Given the choice between that, juggling multiple saves, or fast-forwarding through the whole game (the usual alternatives in visual novels), it’s clearly a superior way of going about things.
As for the story itself, while I wouldn’t say that Wild Islands is a literary tour-de-force or anything, it’s still a solid adventure that has enough twists and turns to keep its momentum going for a few hours. More importantly, there are enough places where you can meaningfully impact the direction of the story that it doesn’t just feel like you’re just clicking through text. And not only that, your choices really do matter – you can choose to betray someone or not early on, and, without getting into spoilers, that decision has impacts on what happens much later on.
Which means I’ll reiterate what I wrote up top: if you really want to relive the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, you absolutely need to play Choice of Life: Wild Islands. It’s a fun update of that old formula, told in a way that gives you a little more agency over what happens.
Blazing Planet Studio provided us with a Choice of Life: Wild Islands PC code for review purposes.
