Sometimes choosing your own adventure means closing one door to open another. The stories told through choose-your-own-adventure games are the strongest, as there’s nothing like the thrill of becoming engrossed in the story and choosing how it ends. Your path could lead you to victory or a quick demise. Save the Princess is designed like a text-based CYOA game. By playing it, you’re the star of the story. It puts the player in control. Every few pages, you have to make a critical decision on how to proceed. This is usually used as a metaphor for real-life conflict.
Save the Princess has some sort of quest or mission mechanic that gives your character “Vladmir” a reason to get out and explore the world, gain experience using your skills, and make an impact on the game world.
This game is tough to boil down. It emphasizes story; that lets you inhabit a character through skill points, inventory, and dialogue decisions; that include complex, controllable relationships with companions or non-playable characters.
Save the Princess beckons players to play through good, bad, and grey choices, eventually leaving it up to the player to decide which route is the most rewarding whether to save Tanya or not. In reality, we may often live in the grey, with the choice to do good or bad. Therefore, through experimentation in the digital world, we can learn that our good choices are often more rewarding than our bad ones.
What’s unique about this game is that feeling that you have total control over the consequences of your actions. If you want to be a villain, the game isn’t going to stop you from doing all of the wrong things. However, one of the protagonists turns on the player, making for an interesting moral dilemma. Should you feel guilty for playing as the villain, even though you had no way of knowing it at the time?
Being able to make such a huge decision determining life or death at the age of 5-10 is empowering in some ways. The most important thing is to get kids reading. And the reading happens only if kids are put in the driver’s seat. They make choices, and so they read.
The classic line from Spider-Man comes to mind here: “with great power, comes great responsibility.” The lesson learned in this game is that even with your best intentions at hand, there are going to be outside forces preventing you from achieving your goals. Save the Princess will allow you to feel the adventure, in English and Russian language as well.
Gaming on mobile phones is often associated with fast-moving gameplay and intensive graphics. While there is no doubt that those types of games are popular, other genres of games are also popular in their own right. Check out Save the Princess – a different Choose Your Own Adventure style, text-based game. However, this game is not free but it costs you only £1.99 to be able to download it.
Rating: 8/ 10
Price: $ 1.99
