Interactive fiction is a blast. Games, visual novels, choose your own adventure books, these are all entertaining ways to spend your leisure time. Lately it has been very popular on android and ios, as you will find various types of mobile games offering stories with choice based options. I suppose calling them various is a bit of a jump as they are all fairly similar. And I have found most of these, at least the ones that I have tried, provide fairly interesting stories. Episodes is one of these.
Episodes, I should state, is a bit different from other apps of similar quality because not only can you read from their collection of stories but you can also make your own through their website. The code can be a bit tricky to learn, but there are a great number of useful tutorials on how to use it! It is always fun to see what one can come up with using a creative coding system. I played around with it a bit myself; I have not managed to publish anything, and do not believe I will on that platform, simply because it does not suit my personal needs, BUT I did play around with the coding enough to make sure it was in fact accessible to new users. After a few days of studying tutorials, I have to say it’s not that hard to learn, and if you enjoy the way Episodes is set up, it is a great system to use.
Episodes, unlike similar apps, uses an animation heavy display, which does not work for those of us who prefer to write over coding. However, if you do enjoy these aspects, and being more like a director than a writer, it is a great fit.
Now, beyond the creative options, this app does have a fairly good collection of stories, though most are of a romantic nature. A good thing though is that there seems to be a bit more variety than in similar apps, which seem to be drowned in vampire and werewolf stories. If you like them great, but I have read far too many that are way to similar. Sadly, it does lack in my preferred genre’s as well, which tend to be fantasy based.
Now, as most of these apps go, Episodes does have one major issue that bothers me, though I do understand the reasoning for it. Paid choices. Episodes, like many similar apps, allows you to purchase gems to progress through these paid choices, or you also earn diamond for reading certain stories. So if you love to read, you will come up with plenty of gems. Though that does not really help you if you are on a current story and you want to see a premium rout.
Now you may be wondering, Tawny, what is your problem with paid routes in games, after all this is not the first time you have brought this up! Well, dear reader, I am simply a spoiled reader who enjoys having full access to content. However, given Episodes is a free application, I will not complain too much as even without the premium choices the stories are top notch and worth the read.
Overall, whether you are a reader or a writer, you can probably enjoy Episodes.