Choose-Your-Own-Adventure in God of Magic

For some people (me very much included), childhood didn’t get much better than a choose-your-own-adventure book. After all, the combination of reading a great story and playing through what essentially amounted to a solo dungeons & dragons campaign was hard to beat. Nowadays, people don’t often buy any books, much less choose-your-own-adventures. Luckily, for people who are now dedicated to their smartphones but still feel the itch for a choose-your-own adventure book, there’s God of Magic.

Choose-your-own-adventure fans have had a few gems come through their smartphones. For example, the Lifeline series threw you into a story that you felt like a part of, while the Sorcery! series brought an interactive text world to life. It’s still a shallow enough market that any quality entrants are well-appreciated, though. That’s why any choose-your-own-adventure fan with a smartphone needs to give God of Magic a try.

The game starts with the player being “summoned” and soon after finding out they’re a god. As a god, you can influence the story by giving your summoner advice on what they should do (in a similar manner to Lifeline). The best parts of the game, though, are when your summoner calls on you for help in some way, triggering a minigame. There are four minigames: Lock Picking, Spell Casting, Dexterity, and Logic. Lock Picking is what it sounds like, Spell Casting involves hitting a target with fireballs, Dexterity involves a quick, color-matching puzzle, and Logic is a sliding puzzle.

One of the cool things about the minigames is that you can also train your skills by playing increasingly hard levels of each minigame independent of the story. Also, if you’re struggling to beat a minigame level, you can pay in-game currency to defeat it. You can train as much as you want, though you’ll be forced to watch an ad every 10 levels. Similarly, the story will occasionally force you to watch an ad to keep going, but they let you play for a good while before each time this happens.

God of Magic also includes three side stories besides the main story, with more stories supposedly coming soon. I haven’t finished the first story yet, but it seems like it’ll be pretty long considering how much of the map I have yet to uncover. Even if there wasn’t this much content, though, God of Magic is free, so it’s all gravy.

At the end of the day, God of Magic is simply one of the best choose-your-own-adventure games you can play on your smartphone. Any fans of interactive, well-told stories would be doing themselves a disservice by not giving God of Magic a try. Even if you just want to play the minigames, you’ll probably have a good time too.

Download God of Magic on iPhone or Android