You Will Select a Decision

by Brendan Patrick Hennessy profile

Ersatz Gamebook
2013

Web Site

Return to the game's main page

Reviews and Ratings

5 star:
(27)
4 star:
(33)
3 star:
(9)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Ratings: 70
Write a review


Showing All | Show by Page


- biscuit, October 2, 2023

- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), September 7, 2023

- jgkamat, March 18, 2023

- Andrew Schultz (Chicago), January 4, 2023

- Joey Acrimonious, September 14, 2022

- The Dalek, March 5, 2022

- MoyTW, December 31, 2021

- Ray Leandro (Philippines), December 31, 2021

- beeeeeebop (Colorado, USA), November 23, 2021

- Cryptic Puffin, November 6, 2021

- Jonathan Verso, October 25, 2021

- civilstat (Maine, USA), October 23, 2021

- jjsonick, June 13, 2021

- bjbest60, April 29, 2021

- AKheon (Finland), March 12, 2021

- TheBoxThinker, January 25, 2021

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
You Will Select A Decision: an unWinnable State review, May 18, 2020
by unWinnable State (unWinnableState.com)
Related reviews: unWinnable State, Twine, The List!

I have selected many decisions. I have met many Victory Ends and many Death Ends. Yet there are still many decisions to select and ends to meet.

With You Will Select A Decision, Brendan Patrick Hennessy has created a fun and funny romp Soviet era mortality tale for children, translated poorly into English.

I laughed, I cried… out with laughter, I felt something deep inside, when my stomach hurt from laughing. Most of that is hyperbole, but I did laugh.

You Will Select A Decision‘s first decision is to choose which story to play, “Small Child in Woods” or “Cow Farming Activities on the Former West.” The homepage does tease (taunt) you with “Other Books in This Series,” particularly “It Is Very Good To Be The World Skateboard Champion,” which sadly does not exist.

I played through “Small Child in Woods” with my very pregnant wife. I mention that she is very pregnant not as a humble brag, but to show that You Will Select A Decision is safe for all, even those in my wife’s condition, which is very pregnant. We had a very much amount of enjoyable time with playing. (These are the kinds of sentences I want to write in this review but that would surely annoy the reader and is an entirely inappropriate style for a review.)

My very pregnant wife and I reached a number of endings in our play through. The best feature of You Will Select A Decision is the way the game makes it easy to backtrack and try different paths and discover new endings.

“Cow Farming Activities on the Former West” I played through myself and more thoroughly explored the options. The large number of endings is impressive. More impressive is the quality and entertainment value of all these endings.

Often, Interactive Fiction is a solitary experience, but with You Will Select A Decision I would recommend playing with a partner or even in a group. You can all take turns selecting a decision and laughing with your very pregnant wife.

You can find the SPOILER-Y portion of unWinnable State's review of You Will Select a Decision here.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Virix, April 19, 2020

- Sitri Salmacis (Atlanta), April 9, 2020

- antperson, February 27, 2020

- Chiktabba, January 30, 2020

- _firexe, December 10, 2019

- Ry (Philippines), September 30, 2019

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
I Will Write a Glowing Review, June 16, 2019

You Will Select a Decision is an extremely well-written piece that uses Soviet-era tropes and language quirks to full effect, creating a world that draws the reader in with atmosphere, charm, and stellar humour. It's a pity there are still only two adventures within, since the titles of the others teased in the beginning seemed ripe for potential. Nevertheless, I highly recommend these stories, and if you're a big fan of word play, choose-your-own-adventure books, or whimsical Soviet references (or better yet, all three), you're sure to get a big kick out of it. Five Orders of Lenin.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- suchamazingdoge (Austin, Texas), May 16, 2019

- Accatitippi (Italy), August 27, 2018

- Ophelia, February 15, 2018

- prog_frog, January 20, 2018

- Dominia, December 23, 2017

- M. C. DeMarco (Boston), October 18, 2017

- Wanderlust, August 3, 2017

- Ivanr, August 1, 2017

- Laney Berry, May 18, 2017

- IFforL2 (Chiayi, Taiwan), April 3, 2017

- Sobol (Russia), November 23, 2016

- hoopla, November 2, 2016

- Catalina, March 16, 2016

- Lanternpaw, March 11, 2016

- Kevin Snow, February 15, 2016

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A humorous pair of CYOA games that lets you back up at any point, February 3, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This is a pair of hilarious games which claim to be translations of old Russian CYOA games. This leads to some of the funniest writing I have ever seen in an Interactive Fiction game. The game is enormous, with a large number of branches, some of which converge again later.

What really makes this game stand out to me is the option to undo any number of your choices and explore more branches. So many Twine games have interesting options that you cannot explore without redoing large portions of the game. This alone made You Will Select a Decision stand out.

There was strong profanity at one point, but as you are penalized for using it, it wasn't especially disruptive.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Teaspoon, January 30, 2016

- Onirim (Argentina), December 31, 2015

- RoboDragonn, November 8, 2015

- Trobairitz (USA), October 28, 2015

- leanbh, September 21, 2015

- timsamoff (Southern California), May 6, 2015

- zylla, January 24, 2015

- CMG (NYC), January 17, 2015

- 010101010101110001010, November 30, 2014

- ArchDelacy, November 21, 2014

- Joshua Houk, October 18, 2014

- jazzypup, May 27, 2014

- Floating Info, April 1, 2014

- Ismarus, March 10, 2014

- Lorxus, March 8, 2014

- Laura Michet (Los Angeles), November 15, 2013

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), September 12, 2013

- Artran (Taipei, Taiwan), August 24, 2013

- Mostly Useless (Leicester, UK), August 21, 2013

- Ghalev (Northern Appalachia, United States), June 24, 2013

- Loksuven (Montana), June 1, 2013

- Edward Lacey (Oxford, England), March 3, 2013

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
A high point for Russian Choose Your Own Adventure books, and for absurd writing, February 22, 2013
by Wade Clarke (Sydney, Australia)
Related reviews: choice-based, Twine

The shtick of You Will Select A Decision is that the English translations of a pair of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) knockoff books originally written by Russian computer scientists in the 80s have just now become widely available. The real author of this work is Brendan Patrick Hennessy, and he has created one of the funniest and best written absurd text games I have ever played. The two self-contained adventures demonstrate a deep understanding of all the methods of the original CYOA books, and so are able to mobilise and make fun of the lot of them over their course. Perhaps the most faithful feature is the way every passage of text in the games is tied to a real page number, allowing for the classic CYOA 'turn to' parlance to be in place.

"If you take on a fisty attitude and confront the witch head on, turn to page 53"

The humour of You Will Select A Decision is fuelled both by the strange outlook of the books' faux Russian authors and by the superb contortions of the translated text. The first story, Small Child in Woods, is about a peasant girl who sneaks out of her village one night in defiance of parental strictures. This story gives the authors a chance to expound on life in the context of their home turf. The second story is a lot more fanciful and has the reader playing a cowboy in Wyoming in the 1800s, a tale obviously begging to be mishandled by its Soviet Union authors.

We live in times when even a clueless person can prise the occasional linguistic gem out of the back and forth of Google Translate, but it takes a writer's skill and understanding of language to consistently craft and squish faux-translated words into a form that is funny for showing up all our assumptions about the workings of English. This is what has been achieved at length in You Will Select A Decision. Weird choices of tense, verbs and nouns are exploited to produce a constant stream of misdirections, surprises and absurdities. The fake authors try for a stern narrator's voice, but most of the time they succeed only in being capricious. The usual set of morals in CYOA books is usurped by advocations of Communist pride and anecdotes about obscure Soviet heroes. The main joke is that when the fake authors aren't waxing ideology, they're just clueless about how to satisfy a reader or tell a tale competently. The stories swerve towards or away from exciting moments in just the wrong fashion, and in a manner you can imagine would be guaranteed to irritate a sincere child reader. A great set piece may be followed by an unavoidable stupid death involving rocks falling on the reader's head. A climax may be steadfastly worked towards and then not delivered.

You Will Select A Decision remains vigilant in delivering this fantasy of a specific kind of hilariously bad, translated storycraft from its two starts to all of its numerous finishes. With more than 200 pages of content across both stories, the game also satisfies as legitimately designed CYOA, with just as many major and minor branches of possibility as you would expect from one of the real books. I laugh a lot in life, but I don't think I've ever laughed along with a computer game as much or for as long as I did with this one.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | View comments (2) - Add comment 

- Galena, February 19, 2013

- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), February 19, 2013

- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), February 19, 2013

- E.K., February 18, 2013

- Porpentine (Oakland, CA), February 17, 2013

- Molly (USA), February 14, 2013

- EJ, February 9, 2013


Showing All | Show by Page | Return to game's main page