Mature Story Apps: What That Word Actually Means, and Which Ones Are Grown-Up

Search for a mature story app and you get two completely different products wearing the same label.

One is adult the way a prestige drama is adult: characters who lie, stakes that stay bad, jokes that don't apologize. The other is adult the way a browser tab is adult. Both show up in the same results. Neither says which one it is, because the vaguer word sells to both crowds, and the App Store isn't going to sort it out for you.

So let's sort it out. Here's what's actually in this category, who each part is for, and, since we make one of these things, an honest account of where ours fits and where it doesn't.

The two meanings, and why they got tangled

The tangle is commercial, not accidental. "Mature" is the safest label a store will let a story app wear, so everything crowds under it: the romance app with a fade-to-black kiss, the horror app with a body count, and the chat app that is definitely not fading to black. One word, three products.

The tell is usually the medium. Explicit content is expensive to film and impossible to list, so it tends to arrive as text or illustration, the two formats you can produce endlessly and describe vaguely. Mature drama tends to arrive with a cast, a budget, and a runtime, because the things that make a story feel adult (timing, subtext, an actor deciding how long to hold a pause before answering you) cost money and can't be generated by the yard.

Once you know that, the category reads quickly.

The map

Tap-to-read serials. Episode, Choices, Chapters, Romance Club. This is the center of gravity: illustrated characters, dialogue you advance with a tap, chapters that end on a hook. Episode leans on an enormous user-written library; Pixelberry's Choices leans the other way, writing in-house so quality stays level. All of them are free to download and run on some flavor of chapter timer and premium-choice currency, the story is free, the good version of the story is not. That model is genuinely fine if you read one chapter a night and genuinely maddening if you binge. Know which reader you are before you start.

Literary interactive fiction. Inkle's 80 Days and Sorcery! series, Simogo's Device 6. Mostly text, mostly one-time purchases, no currency, no timers. 80 Days takes the Verne novel and makes you Passepartout, routing a circumnavigation you can genuinely botch. Device 6 turns the text itself into the map, you read around corners. These are the best-made things in the category and the least like television. If you want a book that fights back, start here.

Chat fiction. Hooked and its imitators. Stories delivered as text-message threads, sized for four minutes in a queue. Wonderful format, structurally allergic to depth: you can build dread one bubble at a time, but you can't build a character.

AI chat. The newest wing, and the one bending the word "adult" hardest. A model plays a partner and improvises indefinitely. Infinite, responsive, and authored by nobody, which is exactly the appeal for some readers and exactly the problem for others. Nothing is about anything. It just continues.

Live-action interactive film. Real actors, real footage, choices that cut the film. It's the smallest wing by far, for the obvious reason: everyone else can ship a story for the cost of writing it, and we have to shoot ours.

That's where we live, so here's the pitch, with the caveats attached.

Treezy Play, and what it actually is

Treezy Play is an interactive film platform for iPhone. Our debut title is The Seminal Works of Dr. Tiffany Belle, a dark comedy about forty minutes long, with four branches and twenty-eight endings, and you play it like a phone call.

Not a metaphor. Dr. Tiffany Belle FaceTimes you mid-story. You answer, and you talk, out loud, in your own words, whatever they are. No menu underneath, no "press 1 to agree." Say yes however a person actually says yes and she takes the yes; tell her no and the film goes where a no goes. If she doesn't catch your meaning she asks again, in character, and keeps listening, because a scene that stalls waiting for you to find the magic phrase isn't a scene.

What that buys you is the thing the rest of the category can't buy: performance. Someone made a decision about how Tiffany says the line, and it's the same decision whether you're delighted or appalled. A tap-to-read app can offer more branches than we ever will. It cannot offer you an actor's face while you say something stupid.

Now the caveats, in the same voice.

We are one film. If you want a library to disappear into for six months, we are the wrong purchase and Episode is the right one. We are iOS only today: Android is in internal testing, playing full stories, not yet open. The app is free; a membership unlocks the films, and the debut runs about forty minutes, so buy it as a film rather than as a season.

And the caveat that matters most for people who arrived here on the other meaning of "adult": this isn't porn. Dr. Tiffany Belle is adult like a late-night cable comedy is adult, grown-up, sharp-elbowed, occasionally filthy in the mouth. It's not explicit and it's not going to be. If explicit is what you came for, we'd rather tell you plainly now than take your money and disappoint you in twelve minutes.

🎬 Watch the trailer, one minute, and you'll know if it's your kind of thing.

Choosing, in four honest questions

How do you want to spend? One-time purchases (Inkle, Simogo) and memberships give you the whole story. Currency models give you the story in installments and charge for the parts you'll want most. Neither is a scam; they're just different deals, and the second one costs more if you're a binger.

Do you want a library or a film? A library is for habit. A film is for an evening. Most disappointment in this category is someone buying one and wanting the other.

Does the medium match the feeling you're after? Text is the best value and the worst company. Illustration is warm and endlessly patient. Live action is the only one that can look you in the eye, and it's the shortest.

Should your choices scar, or just decorate? Plenty of "choices" set a personality flag and change a line of dialogue. Fewer of them close a door behind you. If you want the second kind, look for a small ending count on a short runtime, that's a story with real branches, rather than a big number on a long one, which usually means variations on a theme.

What the category is still missing

Mature interactive stories are mostly still reading with buttons. That was the right compromise in 2015, when phones couldn't do better and neither could budgets. Phones can do better now. The bottleneck stopped being technical a while ago; it's that filmed branching narrative is a genuinely awful thing to produce, and text is a genuinely wonderful thing to produce, and so the category drifted where the economics pointed.

We think that drift left something on the table: the sensation of a story that's in the room with you, that reacts in a human face and not a text box, that makes you say a thing out loud and then makes you sit with having said it. That's what we're building. One film so far. More coming.

Free to download, and you can watch the trailer before you decide anything.

🎬 Get Treezy Play on the App Store →

More from us: Interactive movie games · Story-driven mobile games · The new Treezy Play

Frequently asked questions

What makes a story app "mature"?

Two unrelated things, both called the same word. Sometimes it means mature subject matter, moral mess, real consequences, humor with teeth. Sometimes it means explicit content. Most apps let the ambiguity sit there because it's good for downloads. Check the medium and the App Store age rating before you assume which one you've found.

Are mature story apps free?

Usually free to download, rarely free to finish. The serial apps gate chapters behind timers and sell a currency for the choices you'll actually want. The literary ones (80 Days, Sorcery!, Device 6) are one-time purchases with nothing else to buy. Treezy Play is free to download with a membership that unlocks the films.

Are there interactive stories with real actors?

Very few, because filming branches is expensive in a way writing them isn't. Treezy Play is built entirely on filmed footage with a professional cast, The Seminal Works of Dr. Tiffany Belle is a real short film that happens to branch twenty-eight ways.

Does anything let me talk to the characters instead of tapping?

That's the premise of Treezy Play. When Dr. Tiffany Belle calls, you speak your answer out loud and the film cuts according to what you actually said, she picks up your meaning and the story follows it, replying in character on screen.

Is Treezy Play explicit?

No. It's an adult comedy, dark, filthy-mouthed, not pornographic. Closer to a late-night cable show than to anything you'd need a private tab for.

Is it on Android?

Not yet. The Android app is playing full stories in internal testing and it's coming; today the film is on iPhone.