Choose Your Own Adventure Horror Game: A Personal History

I was nine when I figured out you could hold two fingers in a Give Yourself Goosebumps book. One finger held your spot at the page where you had to choose. The other finger went forward, two or three pages, to see what happened if you went left. Then you’d go back. Try right. Stuff the worse choice with the finger you didn’t need anymore. R. L. Stine had no idea, and I’d like to think he wouldn’t have minded.

That was my first choose your own adventure horror game. It didn’t have a screen. It had a thumbprint on page 47 from when I’d marked my place with a peanut butter sandwich.

The form went somewhere. It became console horror. It became cinematic. It came back around to text-based on phones and then to fully voiced productions on PlayStation. But the DNA of the Goosebumps paperback is still there — the moment where the page asks you what you want to do, and the moment you flip forward and find out you’ve done it wrong.

Until Dawn (the modern Goosebumps)

Supermassive’s 2015 game is the cleanest line from Stine’s paperbacks to the modern era. Eight teenagers at a cabin, branching paths, characters who die when you make the wrong call. The Butterfly Effect tracker shows you which decisions are mattering in the background, and it’s the same dopamine hit as flipping forward two pages to check.

If you grew up holding two fingers in a paperback, Until Dawn is the game that’s been waiting for you.

The Walking Dead (Telltale, the season that broke us)

Telltale’s 2012 The Walking Dead Season One is the other essential text. Five episodes, hundreds of choices that mostly didn’t matter, but a handful that did — and the ones that did still wreck people. The “save Doug or save Carley” moment is the choose-your-own-adventure mechanic at its most cruel: you have ten seconds, you can’t have both, and there is no take-back.

The game tells you “Lee will remember that” after almost every dialogue choice. Most of the time it’s lying. The lie is part of the design.

Heavy Rain (the one that started it on console)

2010. Quantic Dream. Four playable characters, a kidnapping, choices that can kill any of the four before the credits. Heavy Rain is the game where “your choices matter” became a marketing line in this genre. It’s aged unevenly — the QTEs are bad, the writing is sometimes goofy, the motion controls are a memory of a worse time — but the structure is still ahead of most things being made today. Play it on PC. Rebind the controls.

Detroit: Become Human (the design statement)

Quantic Dream again, eight years later, with the lesson learned. Detroit shows you the flowchart at the end of every chapter. Every branch you missed. Every choice that was on the table. It’s the most respectful choose-your-own-adventure game I’ve ever played because it doesn’t pretend your second playthrough is your first. It says: here’s what you did, here’s what you didn’t, here’s everything that’s still possible.

The Quarry (the most recent strong example)

2022. Supermassive again. Summer camp. Nine teenagers. The branching is a little less granular than Until Dawn — you can’t quite kill everyone the way you could on the mountain — but the moment-to-moment choices feel weightier because the production budget is higher. The Quarry is what you’d give your friend who liked The Walking Dead but wants something more cinematic.

Late Shift, The Bunker, and the FMV revival

Worth mentioning: the FMV (full-motion video) revival of the late 2010s gave us a wave of literal-cinema choose your own adventure games. Late Shift, The Bunker, The Complex, I Saw Black Clouds. Some of these are better than they have any right to be. The Bunker in particular is a tight little BBC-adjacent psychological horror that’s worth four hours and almost no money on Steam sales.

What’s left of the form

The thing nobody talks about when they discuss this genre: your choices stop mattering the moment you save-scum. The form requires committing to the bad outcome. If you reload after every death, you’re not playing a choose your own adventure horror game — you’re optimizing a movie. The original Goosebumps paperbacks didn’t have a reload. They had a thumbprint and a mistake you had to live with.

The games on this list that work best are the ones that punish save-scumming. Until Dawn auto-saves over your previous save when you make a decision. You have to live with it. That’s not a UX flaw. That’s the genre working.

What I’m building

I’m a solo developer working on The Bone Game, a cinematic horror game in this lineage. Six teenagers, a Friday night, a story told from a treehouse. I’m trying to keep the spirit of the paperback — the moment where you choose and the moment you find out — while building it for screens instead of pages.

If anything I wrote here resonated, you can put The Bone Game on your wishlist. Or you can pick up a Give Yourself Goosebumps book at a thrift store for two dollars and remember why this matters. Either works. The next post is about the difference between choice-based and branching-narrative games, which sounds like a hair-splitting distinction but isn’t.