Book of Mormon Adventures

I am LDS and I've spent a lot of time with the Book of Mormon. I'm also a writer of interactive fiction and a researcher of Mormon literature. As an LDS person, I liked being able to see Book of Mormon events from another perspective, even a simple one meant for teaching children. I liked that "The New Star" pitted honoring one's parents against following Jesus. I liked that you could complain about eating raw meat in "Nephi's Journey." And I liked that you could be a Zoramite or a Nephite in "Moroni's Warriors."

As an IF writer, I didn't find the narrative design or my choices all that interesting. I did like that the styling of the pages reminded me of church manuals. All three games are branch-and-bottleneck with slight changes to the ending text based on your previous choices. As a more experienced player, I wanted more nuance in how the choices affected the narrative. But as an introduction to interactive fiction for children, I understand how it's helpful for all choices to end up in a basically okay ending.

As a Mormon literature scholar, these are a fascinating reprise of the "home literature" era in the early 1900s, where most stories were meant to show the positive consequences of following the commandments (or the inverse).