My favourite CYOA was the utterly bonkers 'You Are A Shark!' in which you somehow soul-jumped into lots of animals in a quest to return to your original body. I vaguely recall something about a mystic artefact/temple in the Himalayas which caused this predicament.
My pre-teen self viewed the "failure" mode in which you failed to return to your original form but re-incarnated as a snow leopard as the true victory condition. Much preferable to the boring official "good" ending where you ended up back as yourself. :-)
In the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, my favourite was the also bonkers (and maddening) Creature of Havok, in which you start as a bestial instinct-driven mutant creature in a dungeon with no memory of your past. For the first few choices you have to roll a dice to determine where you go - you don't even get to pick! And all of the conversations were in cypher - you had to learn the rules to decode it before you could understand what anyone was saying to you. And you had to crack a different cypher in order to learn how to read.
There's an app version on iOS and Android which is a vast improvement over the physical book, since it takes care of all the decyphering stuff for you automatically.
(The book infamously had a misprint that resulted in an infinite loop at one point. And if you don't do ONE SPECIFIC THING in the first ten paragraphs - something which is in no way signposted or marked as significant - then the final fight is unwinnable)
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Date: 2018-12-12 11:02 am (UTC)My pre-teen self viewed the "failure" mode in which you failed to return to your original form but re-incarnated as a snow leopard as the true victory condition. Much preferable to the boring official "good" ending where you ended up back as yourself. :-)
In the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, my favourite was the also bonkers (and maddening) Creature of Havok, in which you start as a bestial instinct-driven mutant creature in a dungeon with no memory of your past. For the first few choices you have to roll a dice to determine where you go - you don't even get to pick! And all of the conversations were in cypher - you had to learn the rules to decode it before you could understand what anyone was saying to you. And you had to crack a different cypher in order to learn how to read.
There's an app version on iOS and Android which is a vast improvement over the physical book, since it takes care of all the decyphering stuff for you automatically.
(The book infamously had a misprint that resulted in an infinite loop at one point. And if you don't do ONE SPECIFIC THING in the first ten paragraphs - something which is in no way signposted or marked as significant - then the final fight is unwinnable)