The Best Interactive Story Apps, Sorted by What You Want

Search "interactive story apps" and you will get the same eight names in a slightly different order, each one described as immersive, each one somehow both the best and a strong contender. We have published lists like that. They were not useful, and we deleted them.

Here is the thing those lists dodge: "interactive story app" isn't one category. It's three, and they barely have anything in common besides the phrase. One is a comic you tap through. One is a novel that argues back. One is a film that watches you watch it. Downloading the wrong one is the single most common way people conclude they don't like interactive fiction, when what actually happened is they wanted a novel and got a dress-up sim, or wanted a soap opera and got 40,000 words of second-person prose about a dirigible.

So this page sorts the category instead of ranking it. Figure out which of the three you want, and the choice inside each lane gets easy.

Lane one: choice fiction, the tap-through kind

This is what most people picture. Episode, Choices, Chapters, Romance Club, The Arcana. Static or lightly animated art, dialogue on top, and every so often a fork: say the bold thing or the kind thing.

Episode is the biggest by a distance, because most of it isn't written by the company, it's user-generated, with tools that let anyone build a story. That is genuinely the reason to be there. It is also the reason the floor is where it is: an enormous library with no editorial filter is an enormous library you have to filter yourself. Chapters are gated by passes that refill on a timer, and the more interesting choices tend to cost gems.

Choices: Stories You Play, from Pixelberry, is the opposite trade. Fewer stories, professionally written, noticeably better craft in the dialogue and the plotting, and a long-running commitment to a cast that isn't uniformly straight and white. It runs on diamonds, and diamonds gate the choices you most want to make.

Chapters narrows further into romance and drama, some of it adapted from published novels, which is a real draw if you already follow the author. Romance Club works a mythology-and-history angle with an art style that reads as distinctly not-American, and has a reputation for being less grasping about its currency than its rivals. The Arcana is the most stylish of the group, a hand-drawn murder mystery in a plague-struck city, six romance routes, choices framed as tarot.

Now the part the listicles won't say. In this lane, the monetization model is a spoiler for the story structure. When premium currency is spent at choice points, the choice point stops being purely a dramatic instrument and starts being a checkout. You can feel it. The story leans, gently and consistently, toward making the interesting option the paid one, because that is what the mechanic is for. That isn't villainy; it's just what a business model does to a script over time, the way ad breaks shaped the act structure of network television. It is worth knowing before you decide the writing is bad. Often the writing is fine and the incentive is the problem.

If that trade is fine with you, and for a lot of people it genuinely is, this lane is comfort food and there's no shame in comfort food: Choices is where the craft is and Episode is where the volume is.

Lane two: interactive fiction, the reading kind

Older, stranger, better than its reputation, and almost entirely absent from "best story apps" roundups because it doesn't screenshot well.

Choice of Games and its Hosted Games label publish text, no character art, no sprites, just prose in the second person and a lot of it. The variables run deep, the endings actually diverge rather than recolor, and here's the part that matters: you buy the story once and then you own it. No passes, no diamonds, nobody metering your curiosity. Every choice is available to you because you already paid for the book. Coming from lane one, the effect is startling, the story is finally optimizing for being good instead of for the next transaction.

inkle is the other name to know: 80 Days, Heaven's Vault, Overboard!, literary, beautifully made, and proof that a branching story can be a serious piece of work rather than a novelty. They open-sourced their narrative engine, Ink, which is now under a lot of games that never advertise it.

AI Dungeon is the wild card, generating text on the fly so the story goes anywhere you type. "Anywhere" includes nowhere. It's an amazing toy and an unreliable novel, and which of those you get depends on how much you enjoy driving.

If you want a map of the whole tradition (decades of it, much of it free) the Interactive Fiction Database is the front door.

Lane three: filmed stories, where the actors are people

Live-action interactive stories are not a new idea people are only now getting right. They're a 30-year-old idea people keep getting wrong.

The FMV boom of the early nineties put real actors on discs and mostly produced expensive nonsense, because the interactivity was decorative, you weren't making decisions, you were guessing the one right input. The medium came back because a few people found something that only works with a real human face. Sam Barlow's Her Story hands you a police database of video clips and a search box, and that's the whole game: you type words, you watch an actor lie to you, you decide what happened. Nobody chose anything from a menu and it's one of the most genuinely interactive stories ever made. Netflix's Bandersnatch dragged the format in front of a mass audience and proved the appetite is real, even as it also proved that a remote control is a lousy instrument for a scene.

This is the lane Treezy Play is in, and it's worth being blunt about what that means: Treezy is not an alternative to Episode. It is not a text app with better art. It's live-action interactive film (actors, camera, a crew) which makes it a different medium that happens to share a search term. If you want a library of hundreds of romance chapters to read on a commute, we are the wrong download and we would rather say so here than collect the uninstall.

What we're chasing is the thing Barlow found: interaction that requires a person on screen. Our debut film, The Seminal Works of Dr. Tiffany Belle, is a dark comedy played like a phone call. Dr. Belle FaceTimes you, and you don't pick a reply off a menu, you speak, out loud, in your own words, and the film goes where your answer goes. Four branches, twenty-eight endings, about forty minutes a run.

One honest note on how that works, because the category is full of overclaiming right now: your speech steers the story, and Dr. Belle answers in character through the film and through text captions on screen. There is no synthesized voice reading generated lines at you. What you hear is what was performed. We think the seam between "real performance" and "machine improv" is exactly where this medium falls apart, and we'd rather stay on the side of it where an actor is actually acting.

🎬 Watch the trailer, one minute, and the pitch explains itself.

Treezy Play is free on the App Store for iPhone; a membership unlocks the films. More on how the talking works in Treezy Play 1.6, and on the medium generally in our guide to interactive movie games.

The lane people actually mean half the time

A confession about search: a lot of people typing "best interactive story games" don't want an app at all. They want The Walking Dead, Life is Strange, Detroit: Become Human, Until Dawn, Disco Elysium, Firewatch. Those are the high-water marks of choice-driven narrative and mostly they live on console and PC, though a few have made the trip to phones over the years.

If that's you, take the tip and go play them properly on the biggest screen you have. Nothing in the app category is going to substitute, and pretending otherwise is how these lists lose your trust. Our roundup of story-driven mobile games covers what genuinely translates.

One mobile exception worth naming: Duskwood, a detective mystery told almost entirely through a fake messaging app on your phone. It sounds like a gimmick and it isn't, it's the rare case where the format and the story are the same idea, and the dread of a message arriving works because it arrives the way messages actually arrive.

And if you want to make one

The tools got cheap and the good ones are free.

Twine has been the on-ramp since 2009, browser-based, open source, exports a standalone HTML file you can put anywhere, and it will teach you branching structure in an afternoon. Ink (inkle's engine) is where you go when you want to write a lot of prose and wire it into a real game. ChoiceScript is purpose-built for the Choice of Games house style, and they'll publish you. Ren'Py is the default for visual novels and has been for years.

For filmed interactive stories, that's what we build Treezy Studio for, it takes a one-line idea to a branching, playable film and publishes it straight into the Treezy Play app, no crew required.

The craft advice that survives across every one of those tools is short: make choices cost something, keep the fork to two or three options so the reader can actually hold them in their head, funnel branches back together or you'll never finish, and test with people who aren't you.

So: which one

• You want something warm to fall into on a commute. Lane one. Start with Choices; go to Episode when you want volume over craft.
• You want a story that respects you and doesn't nickel you. Lane two. Buy a Choice of Games title outright, or play 80 Days.
• You want to see a face and be seen back. Lane three. Her Story, Bandersnatch, us.
• You want the canon. It's on console. Go get it.
• You want to build one. Twine tonight, free.

The category's real problem was never a shortage of apps. It's that everything got labeled the same, so nobody could find the thing they came for. Pick your lane first. The rest is easy.

More: choose your own adventure games · interactive movie games · mature story apps

Frequently Asked Questions

What are interactive story apps?

Apps where your choices change the story. In practice the label covers three unrelated things: tap-through choice fiction with illustrated scenes (Episode, Choices), prose interactive fiction you read and steer (Choice of Games, inkle), and live-action interactive film where the story is shot with actors (Treezy Play). Deciding which of those you want matters more than which app you pick.

Are interactive story apps free?

Most are free to download and make money after that, which is the part to look at. Lane-one apps typically meter you with premium currency at choice points, so the story is free but the interesting decisions aren't. Interactive fiction from Choice of Games is usually bought once and fully yours. Treezy Play is free to download with a membership that unlocks the films. Twine is free, full stop.

What's the best interactive story app for romance?

Choices for the writing, Romance Club for a less aggressive currency and a distinctive art style, Chapters if you want adaptations of romance novels you already read, The Arcana if you want the strangest and best-looking of the group.

What's the difference between interactive story apps and visual novels?

Visual novels are a specific tradition, static character art, dialogue, occasional forks, with Ren'Py as the standard toolkit. "Interactive story app" is a marketing phrase wrapped around visual novels, text fiction, and filmed stories all at once. Every visual novel is an interactive story; most interactive story apps aren't visual novels.

Are there interactive story apps with real actors?

Yes, and it's the oldest idea in the category. Her Story and Telling Lies are the landmarks; Bandersnatch brought it to Netflix. Treezy Play is filmed interactive cinema built for the phone, where characters call you and you answer out loud.

Can adults enjoy interactive story apps?

Yes, though the marketing skews young because the biggest apps do. Interactive fiction in particular has been writing for adults for forty years. See our guide to mature story apps.