Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I have fond memories of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the youth-skewing books that allow readers to make decisions for the protagonists. Though they were hardly a fixture of my youth, I read a large number of them during a short period of time. I still remember a particular prompt, which I read on the school bus: “If you climb a fence on your way home from school, turn to page 27. If you don’t climb a fence, turn to page 42.”
War Story: Occupied France, from designers Dave Neale and David Thompson, is a Choose Your Own Adventure all its own. You control a group of covert French operatives, completing a trio of missions in German-occupied Europe. It may be more accurate to say “attempting to complete,” since success in War Story is far from assured.
At least the failure is always your fault. War Story is chock full of choices and doesn’t involve luck. There are no aleatoric flourishes here. Everything that happens comes down to the decisions you make, from which agents you deploy at the start of the mission down to the individual choices that pop up from moment to moment. Do you steal the radio truck you just found, or do you leave it alone? Do you attempt to take out a lone guard walking his rounds, or do you try to sneak past? During skirmishes, where do you position your agents?
The bulk of the game plays out in the theatre of your mind, one or two paragraphs at a time. The writing is evocative and tense without ever feeling overwritten. The story moves along without sacrificing tone. Each mission has its own mission book, which includes all possible permutations of the story. At the end of each text block, you’re presented with a series of choices that direct you to other portions of the book. You steal the radio truck? Turn to text block 88. You leave it alone? Block 143.
You’re meant to play War Story as a mini campaign, with the outcome of each mission impacting the next. You can—and will—lose agents. Big-picture changes to the game state are tracked using a log sheet, which is perfectly designed to facilitate the experience. Some choices prompt you to circle a letter on the log sheet, which means the decision you just made will have longer-term consequences. I felt a chill of delight every time I was prompted to circle something. “For what fresh horrors have I planted the seeds?” Death, usually. The game also effortlessly manages practical issues like the flow of time. This is an extremely smart, user-friendly experience.
War Story: Occupied France is all about the joy of narrative discovery. The decisions you make are not interesting in and of themselves. This is not a box of puzzles and intellectual challenges. It is a meditative play experience, much of your time spent turning pages and quietly reading. The level of enjoyment you get out of it comes down entirely to the level of buy-in you can invest into the story. I had a great time. After my first, disastrous mission—the mission accomplished but 4 out of 4 team members dead, baby—I found myself wondering what I could have done differently. Everything, evidently.
There are some frustrating typos, and forgetting the exact section number you’re turning to—look, age comes for us all—can prove disastrous, but there’s no arguing with the quality of the product. This is almost certainly the first in a series of titles, given Thompson’s track record. I’m excited to see where they go. Maybe next time, they’ll ask about my commute home.
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