Choose-your-story games for adults

“Choose your own adventure” used to mean a paperback with a dragon on the cover. These days the best choose-your-story games are written for adults: stories about money, power, family, memory and the price of a decision, where the choices are not just left door or right door.

Here are our picks for grown-up players, from apps to big PC games to one that runs in a browser. They are picks, not a ranking. Facts about each game were checked against the sources at the bottom.

At a glance

Our picks

Disco Elysium

ZA/UM’s 2019 role-playing game is the one people mean when they say a game reads like a novel. You are a police detective who wakes after a binge with no memory and a murder to solve in Revachol, a fictional city still bruised by a failed revolution. As the investigation goes on, he starts to remember his own past, and the game lets you decide what kind of man he turns out to be.

80 Days

Made by inkle, a studio in Cambridge, England, and released in 2014, 80 Days adapts Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. You play Passepartout, Phileas Fogg’s valet, choosing the routes and the transport as you race the clock. It came out first on iOS, then Android, PC, Mac and Switch. TIME named it its game of the year for 2014.

Reigns

From Nerial, published by Devolver Digital in 2016. You are a monarch, and your advisers bring you requests on cards. Swipe left or right. Each answer shifts one of four parts of the kingdom, and if any one goes too far, your reign ends and an heir takes the throne. It is quick, dark and funny, and the long story underneath is better than it first looks.

Life Is Strange

Dontnod Entertainment made it and Square Enix published it in five episodes across 2015. It is an episodic story game, a good fit if you like to play a story one evening at a time. It came out on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and later Mac, Linux and iOS.

The Choice of Games catalogue

Choice of Games publishes interactive novels in ChoiceScript, a language built for choose-your-path stories that play in a browser. The company says it has published more than 150 and that its older back catalogue is free to read. Many of its stories keep track of your character’s values and relationships, so the same choice can play out differently for different people.

AJ Cities

This one is ours, and it is free in your browser on a phone or a computer, 18+. The story deals with crime, police corruption, a deportation and a dodgy club owner, and there is fighting. It is written for adults.

You are AJ, deported from London to Lagos and starting again in Room 3 of Iloro House. Instead of pages, the story happens on a street you walk down. You walk up to people, press E or tap the Action button, and pick your answer. The back story comes out in conversation, not cutscenes. Some of the choices it puts to you:

• What to do with your first ₦1,000. AJ earns it as a ball boy at the street football in the bush. Bet it on the match? Pay it to the gate? (It is story money, not real money.)
• How to deal with the gate police. Sola and Tunde want ₦2,500,000 and keep telling the story of how AJ crossed the Sahara from Libya. He has never been to Libya. Argue, laugh, or pay a little and often, as Sarge advises?
• Whether to borrow, and give back. The officers in the bush lend a shotgun for bottle practice. Borrowing ends with a thank-you, not a disappearing act.
• Whether to shake the Warden’s hand. The Warden owns Prizm and takes ten percent of every deal at his table. He has a small errand for a man with a London accent. Sarge has a warning: when a man in white linen calls you “my son”, count your fingers after you shake his hand.

None of these is a quiz with a right answer. The humour is street-level satire of authority, the police are funny before they are frightening, and the game is never cruel to you for trying something. You can read AJ’s story in six chapters first, then play it.

What “for adults” means here

For this list, a choose-your-story game for adults is one where the decisions are the kind grown-ups actually face: who to trust, what to owe, when to keep quiet. Not every game here has an age rating that says so; we picked them for their themes, not for shock. If you want one that is clearly adults-only, AJ Cities is 18+, and so is the App Store rating of BitLife, the life sim many of these players come from.

More: story games you can play free online and the best crime story games.

What is a good choose-your-story game for adults?

Our picks include Disco Elysium, 80 Days, Reigns, Life Is Strange, the Choice of Games catalogue and AJ Cities, a free 18+ browser game set in Lagos.

Is there a free choose-your-story game in a browser?

Yes. Choice of Games makes its older back catalogue free to read online, and AJ Cities is free to play in a browser.

How do choices work in AJ Cities?

You walk up to a character, press E on a keyboard or tap Action on a phone, and pick your answer. The story is told in conversation, not cutscenes.