It’s probably pretty apparent that I absolutely love choose your own adventure style games, but they are actually pretty hard to do well. I’ve reviewed several of them in the past, and they all tend to have the same flaws: namely, that they cost too much money and are too limited. The interactive novel 8th Continent, however, fixes both of these issues.
In 8th Continent, you play as Morgan, a teenager who survived the end of the world with your family. However, when your family suddenly goes missing, you have to go on a quest to try and track them down. Through the story, you’ll meet several other characters, collect unique equipment, and battle giant bugs that are surprisingly creepy, all set to the backdrop of a ruined world.
Unlike other choose-your-own-adventure books, 8th Continent beautifully incorporates an inventory system, character statistics, and mini games (including interactive battles using a deck of cards) to help direct the tale. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and although I had my reservations at first, the game itself is actually a ton of fun. There are two different mini games: a matching game with the pretense of sifting through rubbish for items, and a ‘hack’ game where you have to manipulate power cables in order to create a complete circuit and unlock safes and other things.
Personally, I found the matching games to be much better than the hack games, but fortunately there is an option you can enable to skip through the games. I am not sure I’d recommend it on your first playthrough, however, that way you get the full experience.
The game itself is surprisingly long with tons of different storylines and options. I played through the whole game and have started to go back through for a second run and I can already see some differences. The app website says that there are more than 2,000 pages with multiple endings (including death if you’re not too savvy) although there’s no list of how many endings there actually are.
There are also lots of extra things, including a really fun decryption function which I almost completely missed the first time through as the app really doesn’t mention it much. In short, if you don’t mind rereading some things, there is actually a bit of replay value. Additionally, the developers have already released the sequel and have announced a third is in the works.
As far as the actual storyline goes, the writing is pretty good with very few typos. The characters are believable and the world is actually very fascinating with a lot of unanswered questions that have me itching to download the sequel.
8th Continent is available for free, although there are a few full-screen ads scattered here and there. Personally I found them to be placed well enough that it didn’t really change my enjoyment of the app at all. However, if you just have a burning hatred of apps, you can instead pay $1.99 and get the story ad-free. You can download the app from
Google Play, the App Store, or
Amazon.]]>
