As someone who grew up in the 80s, the mention of the Choose Your Own Adventure books pretty well immediately sends me to a happy place. Though I only owned a few of them, they were the first books I was looking for every time I went to the library, and if there weren’t any new ones I’d tend to cycle back through the old since I loved them so much. That mix of different worlds, times, people, and the chance to meet your demise with every page turn was just special to me. Now, if you’re going to make a new story-driven game and invoke the name of that series to try to pull people in, you’d damn well better be delivering. Sadly, on pretty well every level, Murder on the Disorient Express fails to live up to the comparison.

Making a critical misstep right out of the gate, I think choosing a murder mystery format as the target for this style of play was a serious error. What made those books work was that they tended, more often than not, to keep you moving and making decisions that would pretty quickly advance the story and what action there could be. Here, instead, you’ll mostly be plodding around from room to room looking for people to talk to, in order to try to divine the answer to the ultimate question of “Whodunnit?” Worse, you really don’t get to do much to direct the conversations once you begin talking to people, instead having to read through a few walls of text as they drone on, pretty well uncontested, about what they’ve been doing and how they fit into the social picture within the overall group. This switches an experience that was all about reader agency, and discovering what could happen, into mostly a normal book where you simply choose what order to talk to people in.

The other element that really derails the experience is the voice work, which I can only assume was made using AI text to voice. Now, seeing as how I use that myself for video reviews, my concerns with that could raise an eyebrow, but the contexts are very different. I would actually always first encourage people to read the reviews posted to the website, where they’ve been hosted for over 9 years now, but I do understand some people prefer a video format, so in only the last 2 or so I’ve used text-to-voice to make producing those possible. In the case of this game though, it’s a product that is being sold and that people are paying for, even if it’s a budget title. The bigger issue though is that the dialogue is conveyed in such a broken and disconnected manner, that honestly the game would have been better off without it, leaving people to simply read it themselves. There’s not an ounce of emotion in any of it, and considering there are moments that get emotionally tense, to hear them read in such a matter-of-fact way can often make them practically laughable. Considering the title feels overridden with these mostly unforced errors, it’s hard to recommend it, even at its low-budget price.