iPhone gamers might find something to like in Alternate Endings, a Choose Your Own Adventure-style murder-mystery that plays out like an interactive movie.
Available from the iPhone App Store, Alternate Endings crosses between a movie, a game and a puzzle, with 16 different storylines, five unique endings and a running time of anywhere from 25 to 40 minutes. “There’s a whole spectrum between movies and video games,” Greg Townsend, the man behind the project, told mental_floss. “If people are going to experience some sort of media, do they want to just sit and watch it, or do they want to interact with it? A game is on one end of that, a movie is on the other end of that. So we’re playing in the middle of the spectrum.”
We probably don’t want to read too much into this, but Alternate Endings is the second “choose your own ending” game built around live-action video that we’ve seen in the past few weeks. Admittedly, the YouTube-based Time Machine is significantly shorter and simpler, but you don’t need an iPhone to play it, either. With inexpensive, high-quality video cameras and shameless friends looking for some quick internet fame both in ready supply, could we be looking at the beginning of a new kind of homebrew interactive entertainment?
A quick preview of Alternate Endings is available via YouTube, or if you do happen to have an iPhone and want to see the real thing in action, you can download it from the App Store here.
