YMMV / Choices: Stories You Play

• And You Thought It Would Fail: Several books were greeted with little enthusiasm upon their announcement, but ended up being quite popular, the most prominent examples being Bloodbound, Desire & Decorum, and Ride or Die: A Bad Boy Romance.
• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • To many players, 2019 is this because most of the new releases were gender locked and/or romance-heavy, which many players found mediocre at best and badly written at worst. They feel like Choices is trying too hard to compete with Chapters: Interactive Stories rather than focusing on what they do best. Not helping matters was that three ongoing stories^note Red Carpet Diaries, America's Most Eligible, and Desire & Decorum featured the protagonists getting married in the third book, denying the possibility of staying single in case none of the love interests appeal to the player. Moreover, two popular non-romance series, The Elementalists and Nightbound, ended abruptly with seemingly more of their story to tell, fueling speculation that Pixelberry canceled them to focus on putting out more romance books. There were a few bright spots, however. Open Heart received positive reception and a second book was released the following year. Among the standalones, Ride or Die: A Bad Boy Romance, Platinum, and Mother of the Year were praised for having well-written, memorable characters, and compelling narratives.
  • The summer period, especially late July and early August, is considered the worst period of 2019. Within just a few days, Nightbound and The Elementalists were canceled despite their relative popularity, Platinum was put on hiatus until August 22, and America's Most Eligible Book 3 was delayed until the Fall. Of the remaining active books^note Bloodbound, Red Carpet Diaries, The Royal Heir, Sunkissed, Bachelorette Party, Big Sky Country, and Desire and Decorum, all but Big Sky Country are genderlocked and all but Bloodbound are romances (and even Bloodbound is a horror-romance hybrid).
  • 2020 ended up having its own issues, largely thanks to an abundance of badly-written romance-heavy books like Witness, and the release schedule being sparse due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the adventure book Blades of Light and Shadow ended up being one of the app's most popular books ever, while Queen B received praise for its humor and willingness to shake up Choices' usual formula by having a morally gray protagonist.
  • Similarly, most books in early 2021 were widely derided, owing to the unsatisfying conclusion of books such as Foreign Affairs and the much-despised ending to the Open Heart trilogy. The disastrous writing of Open Heart, Book 3, with the sudden change in character personality and the absence of many fan-favorite characters has made many fans reconsider the once derided Book 2. Additionally, with the unpopular Baby Bump, Book 2 running concurrently with Foreign Affairs, many fans have blamed it for taking away attention from the writing team to focus on the newest book. Fortunately, the era came to a temporary end, with new books such as Laws of Attraction, and A Very Scandalous Proposal receiving far more positive reviews than its predecessors. The VIP-exclusive book Slow Burn has similarly received major praise for its unique character design and genuinely interesting storyline. Additionally, the release of The Nanny Affair, Book 2, has been met with lukewarm to positive reviews, with many players having previously ignored the first book now re-reading it in an effort to understand the storyline.
  • After the last quarter of 2021 and the better part of 2022 brought a wide variety of gender-customizable books to the table (including zombie horror, multiple murder mysteries, fantasy, and action), the tail end of 2022 and most of 2023 (Kindred, Crimes of Passion, Book 2, and Blades of Light and Shadow, Book 2 aside^note and even then, the former had an Anti-Climax Boss and disappointing ending, while the latter two weren't bad by any means, but they failed to live up to their respective first books) have unfortunately regressed the franchise back to mid/late 2019 levels of mediocre, being comprised mostly of books that are gender-locked, mostly focused on romance (complete with only one love interest and mature sexual content, including the new GOC books), and have boring plots and/or forgettable (or even unlikable) characters, even when the stories could have had so much more. Standouts in this department include First Comes Love^note which involves the main character repeatedly plotting to sabotage her crush's relationship over a Fallback Marriage Pact made 10 years prior, while drunk, The Duchess Affair^note another "cheating story" which manages to be boring and anti-climactic, even by the standards of historical fiction Choices stories, and especially The Billionaire's Baby^note Which, in addition to being yet another story involving an affair with a married person, has a delusional main character who keeps thinking the (surrogate) child she's carrying is rightfully hers, damaging the marriage between the baby's mother and parent in the process. It says a lot that the story contains a character who is described by the creators as a "mother-in-law from hell" who more than lives up to that description, and yet her criticisms are more valid than anyone else's.
• Broken Base: Has its own page right here.
• Creator's Pet: One of the primary criticisms Choices receives is the habit of favoring one Love Interest in each story, usually male, by giving them more than enough screen time, plot relevance, and characterization at the expense of other love interests and even the story itself. It becomes more outrageous when another love interest, usually female, becomes Out of Focus and any potential they have in the story wasted. This results in the favored love interests getting hated as they are forced on the player.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Daniel the Waiter (a very minor character who has appeared in several books like The Royal Romance and Rules of Engagement) has amassed a fanbase of his own, as demonstrated by this post.
• Fan Myopia: There is a tendency across many social media platforms for people to assume that a particular book is popular or unpopular based on its reputation and general presence within that particular platform's Choices fan community, seemingly not realizing that any one community represents only a tiny fraction of all Choices players.
• The Firefly Effect: With so many acclaimed books ending up as standalones (or occasionally being rushed to fit into two books), less positively-received books receiving sequels (or even becoming trilogies), and Pixelberry's blogpost about how every story is now written as a standalone (and only becomes a series under the right circumstances), fans have found it harder and harder to get invested in new releases.
• Franchise Original Sin: Various complaints about books released in 2018 and 2019 can be traced back to some of the earliest books.
  • One of the most common criticisms is that the third book in a romance series being heavily based around a wedding has become increasingly common. Red Carpet Diaries, America's Most Eligible, and Desire And Decorum all have their third books based around a wedding and all three of them are releasing across Summer 2019. The first occurrence of this dates back to Rules Of Engagement; however, that series established from the start, as part of the premise, that this would be the case, the potential love interests were likable, and the main character and her fiance planned their wedding together. Additionally, while there were many Premium choices, players were also offered free options that were not as fancy but still suitable for the wedding. In the later books, however:
    • Red Carpet Diaries: The bulk of the wedding planning is done with the main character's "best friend", Chazz, instead of her fiance. What's more, almost all of the planning scenes (not just the options) are Premium options, so the player doesn't even get the pretense of "picking" the free option; if they don't buy the premium option, the wedding planner makes all the choices for them. Additionally, there are already two other plot arcs in place (the first one being the main character making a movie based on her favorite book and the second one being her having a stalker), making the wedding plot seem altogether unnecessary since the book had plenty of material without it.
    • America's Most Eligible: A major criticism of this variation is that the concept of the titular show is to be crowned "Most Eligible", despite it previously being stated that there's nobody less eligible than someone who's already taken. Also, some players find all four love interests boring and dislike that there is no option to remain single.^note Though in a bit of an Author's Saving Throw, the book does allow the player to reject their fiance and marry Bianca or Slater instead. Another point of contention is the wedding score system, which incorporates elements of the scoring systems from both The Heist: Monaco (where certain score ranges result in certain endings), and Most Wanted (where certain choices/bonus scenes can be unlocked by a certain score level); however, while Most Wanted (and its own predecessor in this feature, The Crown and The Flame) generally gave the player the ability to get a high enough score to access options even without buying any diamond choices, the score system in America's Most Eligible has frustrated viewers from Chapter 1, in which unlocking a bonus scene requires a point total that can only be achieved if the player has paid for premium options.
    • Desire and Decorum gets slightly less backlash than the other two, as the need for the protagonist to marry was established as far back as Book 1. However, like Red Carpet Diaries, this one also has most of the wedding planning scenes locked behind premium options.
  • The concept of having to pay diamonds to save people's lives is widely disliked, although this concept can be traced back as far as The Crown and the Flame. However, while the concept was present in said book, it was relatively rare, at least a few also offered the diamond choice as a score-based option (letting the player access it for free if they had a high enough Prestige or Power score), the characters in question were likable and related to the plot, and there was usually a valid in-universe reason available if the player chose not to do so, so while it was still a wrenching choice, declining to do was incorporated in a way that made sense in the context of the story, and the other characters would generally accept it as a necessary evil. Fast forward to Across the Void, where roughly half the main cast will die unless the player pays diamonds to save them. This is excruciating for several reasons. First of all, many of the characters in question are considered either unlikable or irrelevant to the story (sometimes both), with one character having only two or three lines before the point where they need to be saved. Second, there is no way around the paywall; regardless of what choices the player has made up to that point, the moment will come up, and the only choices will be to pay diamonds or let the character die. Thirdly, only a few of these choices come with an in-universe justification; in many of the cases, not paying for the diamond scene results in the protagonist standing by as another character dies when they easily could have saved him/her. Finally, some of these characters are love interests, and in other cases, surviving characters guilt-trip you for letting them die.
  • Reusing character designs for the main character began as early as 2017, when The Royal Romance used the same faces as Love Hacks for the main character. While it was seen as a little bit lazy by some, it was nowhere near as bad as the surge of reused character designs in 2019, specifically with the female Open Heart faces, which were used in six other books within the same year^note Platinum, Sunkissed, Bachelorette Party, Mother of the Year, The Royal Masquerade, and Baby Bump. The trend continued into 2020 with Distant Shores also using them.. It has gotten to the point that whenever the faces from Open Heart are reused in a subsequent book, some fans immediately label the book as bad for this reason (Distant Shores springs to mind). 2020 also began the trend of reusing the female It Lives Beneath faces, which, as of 2022-2023, have now been used more than the female Open Heart faces.
  • Perfect Match is the first Choices book that introduced the concept of "gender-customizable love interests", a concept which has gotten more scrutiny over the years, due to them being less developed than non-customizable love interests by default. However, it's much more tolerable here, since Hayden's personality is customizable as well (opening up plenty of unique dialogue options), and Kai meets them through a dating service, which is a completely understandable in-universe explanation for why their gender is customizable. Furthermore, there are still other love interests available (both male and female, regardless of Hayden's gender) if you choose not to be with Hayden (or, alternatively, you can be in a polyamorous relationship with Hayden and at least one other love interest). Compare this with Choices stories released as little as two or three years later, where the gender-customizable love interest is the only love interest, their personality is watered down to fit both male and female options, despite them still acting male-coded in some cases (i.e. Mayor Dixon from Baby Bump and Kit Jackson from Untameable), there's little to no in-universe justification for them being gender-customizable, and some stories make it so that the main character ends up with them, no matter what. Additionally, some stories even restrict both the main character's and the love interest's sexual preferences to "exclusively the gender of the love interest/main character", going so far as to make it so any character the main character can flirt with (even if they can't end up with them) is always the same gender as the love interest, thereby denying the option of bisexuality in a series of stories where Everyone Is Bi is usually the rule, rather than the exception.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In May 2023, the number of Ad Rewards you could receive per day was increased to 100. Most ads are 30 seconds long, but some are even less than that, meaning you could gain thousands of diamonds in just a few weeks from watching ads alone for not even an hour a day. PB must have realized this, so as of September 11, 2023, the number of daily ads has been reduced to 8 per day, although they reversed their decision after immense backlash.
  • On VIP, the Choices Pass allows you to make up to 15 premium choices on a certain book within a 24-hour period (which can sometimes even amount to several hundred diamond's worth) for free. Combine that with the Diamond Boost even where you're awarded even more diamonds for making premium choices, and diamonds (and, by extension, premium choices as a whole) will eventually become a complete non-issue.
• Girl-Show Ghetto: Stories with female-only protagonists tend to have bad reputations among the fandom. Many argue that such stories are usually inferior in quality, limit the number of people who can enjoy them, and could still have dialogue variations that match the protagonist's gender. It has gotten to the point that a fair amount of players, regardless of gender, refuse to play these stories due to their reputation as boring, badly-written romance stories at best and Porn Without Plot at worst.
• Growing the Beard:
  • While The Freshman is considered to be Pixelberry having a stubble over their last products, Most Wanted and The Crown & the Flame are the books that proved to the audience the company can write a novel that isn't focused on romance and having solid ongoing plots.
  • While The Haunting of Braidwood Manor was relatively well-received, It Lives proved that the Choices team could do horror extremely well, and laid the groundwork for introducing stories with darker themes.
  • While Most Wanted is generally well-received, Veil of Secrets is considered even better, and players see it as proof that Pixelberry can write mystery stories well.
  • While The Heist: Monaco has a fairly good reception for a story with a criminal protagonist, Ride or Die: A Bad Boy Romance is even better received, proving the audience that Pixelberry is capable of writing crime stories that appeal to its target demographic.
• LGBT Fanbase: The Everyone Is Bi nature of most of the stories coupled with most stories' extremely casual attitude toward same-sex relationships have made the app extremely popular within the LGBT community.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Everyone goes to Hartfeld." ^ExplanationDue to the tendency of the company to have Shout-Out to their other books. Some are more subtle than the others, with one of the most common being for the characters to be attending or to have attended Hartfeld University.
  • Some of the more So Bad, It's Good ads for the apps have became infamous in the fandom.
  • Forced White Male LI^ExplanationA common and controversial Recurring Element is adding that one Love Interest who is...a white guy. Oftentimes, players are annoyed that the narrative pushes the protagonist towards romancing him, with varying levels of actual chemistry. Not helping matters is that it usually comes at the expense of an Ensemble Dark Horse female LI, a LI of color, or both who's often seen as much more interesting. Add in that many books don't allow you to choose your character's gender (forcing you to play as a girl) and it can come off as pushing your protagonist towards being straight.
  • Pay to Gay^ExplanationOne criticism Choices receives is the habit of sidelining female love interests, especially in genderlocked stories, and that it's difficult to get to know them without paying diamonds. Another practice the app is criticized for is having to pay diamonds to set couples up, particularly same-sex ones.
  • Pay diamonds to be a good friend or for quality stuff^ExplanationA recurring feature of many Choices stories is the sheer amount of premium options to comfort other characters and get better things, whether it's clothing or props.
• More Popular Spin-Off: The Royal Romance is almost universally agreed to be this to Rules of Engagement due to a stronger plot, more likable and interesting Love Interests, and avoiding most of the flaws that Rules of Engagement suffered from.
• Narm: It often occurs whenever Choices recycles backgrounds and character portraits. For example: having a scene in the jungle with the glowing flowers from Endless Summer, or having the same waiter for all their restaurants across the world, which became a Memetic Mutation for Daniel the Waiter. The most notable example is Wishful Thinking, where almost every character who isn't a love interest has a recycled character portrait.
• Periphery Demographic: While the option of choosing a male Player Character is meant to appeal to male players, a lot of female players enjoy playing as a male player character because they are Yaoi Fangirls or think that the male character options are attractive.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Many players have a habit of doing this to stories they don't like because they're awarded two diamonds (the in-game currency) after completing a chapter for the first time. Even more so after players can watch ads, which reward players with one diamond per ad watched, upon completing any chapter except the first chapter of the book, with a maximum of six ads per day.
• Rated M for Money: 2020 saw the release of the first Mature-rated books, due to PB hoping to capitalize on the popularity of intimate scenes in stories. As a result, these stories often come with Content Warnings of sexual... stuff, but of course not everyone is happy about it, especially non-romance fans. In 2021, PB released the first 17+ rated non-romance books, which come with warnings of graphic violence, and these turn out to be very well-received by fans.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: A unique case. Many in the fandom feel that the non-romance books are miles ahead in terms of plot, writing and character development (most tellingly, most worst-received books are romance stories like Home for the Holidays and Passport to Romance; the only badly-received non-romance book is Across the Void and even then, the derision towards that book was less than the romance ones). This is despite the fact that ads for the app tend to heavily promote the romance stories. Players also hate that some stories force players to have a love interest as part of the plot (often because there is a wedding involved), denying them the option to stay single in case none of the love interests appeal to them.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Most of the books except for Perfect Match have a really bad AI that doesn't recognize a previously purchased outfit you decided to wear for the scenario. To clarify, if you reject the premium outfit being offered to you for the current situation, the characters will react as if you are wearing the basic option, even if you are wearing a premium outfit purchased earlier.
  • Players despise the inability to replay a chapter that you've already played without restarting the entire current book. The one exception is a chapter that you have just finished; however, this requires spending an additional key, and if you don't replay it immediately, you lose the chance.
  • The “collection rooms” in many of the stories receive a lot of hate. Many feel that the game guilt tripping them into filling the entire item space is very distracting from the main plot. Some big examples are The Junior and The Senior’s clue/inspiration cork boards and the empty apartment, while Desire & Decorum has the “accomplished lady skill room”, which only fulfill the purpose of making the gameplay easier. Somewhat better received are stories like Veil of Secrets, Endless Summer, Bloodbound, and It Lives, where the items collected unlock bonus scenes that serve to fill the blanks, with additional bonus scenes made available if the player collects every single item.
  • While diamond requirements for certain options generally fall in the "debated" category rather than "widely disliked", players almost universally agree that having to spend diamonds to save someone's life is a very bad thing because it shames players who can't afford to buy diamonds and discourages critical thinking. (Examples include Prince Tevan in The Crown and the Flame, Nikolai in Veil of Secrets, and numerous characters in Across the Void).
  • Books where one or more of the love interests are gender-customizable often have an issue with referring to said characters by incorrect gender pronouns; specifically, the text often uses male pronouns even if the player chose to make that character a female. Books where this is especially noticeable are The Royal Masquerade (with Hunter and Kayden) and Baby Bump (with Mayor Dixon). These do tend to be fixed eventually, but players wish it could stop happening in the first place.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Let's just say, no one expected the big schedule shake-up in Choices Insiders September 2023, in which the release dates of several books were moved up, including the second book of The Cursed Heart being moved from the first part of 2024 to by the end of 2023 (a gap of three months for early access and even longer for the general release). The Choices Insiders also came with the surprising reveal that October 2023 (on early access) and December 2023 (both early access and general release) will have multiple books being released in the same month, something that Choices had largely stopped doing since the VIP era began.
  • September 22, 2023 brought fans another shocking shake-up when a new Bloodbound book titled "Bloodbound Origins" became visible in the app (despite the series having ended three and a half years prior with not a peep since, until now), as well as the last two chapters of Crimes of Passion, Book 2 being brought forward to the two days after Chapter 14 release instead of the two weeks after.
• Strangled by the Red String: Later books have become infamous for "insta-lust", which is when the main character and love interest are already flirting shamelessly, sometimes kissing, and even fantasizing about each other sexually in the first couple of chapters, with very little (if any) buildup. Sometimes it's justified in the context of the story (such as Alpha, since it's revealed later on that Tal and Channing are soulmates in the context of a werewolf story), but more often not. Special mention goes to Unbridled, in which the main character can flirt (and even sleep in the same bed cuddling) with a man they've only just met, despite having left an abusive relationship the day before.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many fans were not happy when the number of watchable daily ads was dropped from 100 to just 8 on September 11, 2023. While it could be argued that it was too much of a Game-Breaker, the fact that it happened so soon after the "download this app to earn diamonds" scheme was implemented upset fans who didn't want to rely on such a questionable source for their diamonds^note Most apps that reward in-game currency for completing such "tasks" as downloading another app or signing up to a certain scheme have a tendency to be shady, not always giving you the reward and/or selling your data, resulting in you getting bombarded with spam emails. As such, the notion that the "watch 100 30-second adverts for 100 diamonds" system was being replaced with this put many fans off. Thankfully, this decision was reversed almost immediately, but whether it will be un-reversed in the future remains to be seen.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: One of the complaints of the stories with gender options is that they neutralize the protagonist's experiences that they don't provide any unique perspectives depending on the protagonist's gender, which makes their backgrounds and relationships with their love interests lacking in depth. The only aversion is, ironically enough, Veil of Secrets, a story with gender options for the protagonist and a slight difference in writing for both genders. (Blades of Light and Shadow, interestingly, does not change the story based on the player character's gender, but it does change quite a bit depending on whether the player chooses to play as a human, elf, or orc.)
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • One of the most common complaints across the series as a whole is the fact that the Love Interest the player chooses never reacts with jealousy, possessiveness or even extra dialogue when you flirt with another character or love interest. Some books even allow you to date multiple characters at once, and none of your partners ever seem bothered by this. There are also no long-term consequences if you break up with them for someone else, as all of them have the attitude of I Want My Beloved to Be Happy.
  • Another frequent criticism Choices receives is that many of its stories have similar storylines involving a newcomer who rises to the top. Players think these stories would be more interesting if the protagonists are veterans in their fields because they provide compelling perspectives from people with experience. They also think the stories with newcomer protagonists turn said protagonists into Mary Sues to varying degrees.
• Win Back the Crowd: After the last month or two of 2022 and most of the first half of 2023 were full of genderlocked, mediocre romance books, Pixelberry really stepped things up in the second half of the year. Sequels to the beloved series Crimes of Passion and Blades of Light and Shadow were released (with sequels to the similarly-beloved The Cursed Heart and Immortal Desires being planned for release in late 2023 and early 2024), several books had their release dates moved forward by anywhere between a few weeks and a few months (including the aforementioned Blades of Light and Shadow), new gender-of-choice books from multiple different genres were released or announced to be released later on in 2023 or early 2024 (with even more stories announced for 2024, including a GOC murder mystery with multiple love interests), and Crimes of Passion and Blades of Light and Shadow were announced to be trilogies after players were initially led to believe that both of them would end at Book 2.