Choice of the Deathless is a "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style gamebook with an interesting setting, a well-designed narrative structure, meaningful decisions with many different paths to choose from, and a writing style that is generally pretty good but has some peculiarities that drive me up the wall.
The story is set in a world where gods are real and have a presence on Earth, where powerful demons can enter our world but are bound by contracts (which they try to find loopholes in), and where humans have magical abilities called "the craft". You're playing a freshman in a huge law firm that specializes in demonic contracts. Over the course of several assignments, you may or may not prove your worth to your superiors, make friends (or enemies) with colleagues and clients, and even find love. Oh, and you might also save the world. One of them. Kind of.
I found the setting quite fascinating, and I liked that the game plunged me right into it and let me figure things out myself, without much handholding. This gave me a feeling of exploring an intriguing world, and let my gradually increasing understanding feel like an accomplishment, which would not have been possible if all the information had been spoonfed and explained to me. The most striking feature of the world-building is probably how "normal" or self-evident all these powerful beings are depicted. Yes, they could destroy large parts of the world (or at least you) if the contracts aren't flameproof, but they have the demeanor of regular clients or adversaries in any bog-standard legal conflict - because dealing with these powers _is_ standard in this world.
I also enjoyed the story, but found it surprisingly bland at times. The game really lets you feel that you're just a tiny cog in a humongous corporation, and while that fits the setting, it's usually not the kind of experience that I'm looking for when playing a game. The legal cases themselves were interesting, though.
The narrative structure is nicely designed and feeds into engaging gameplay. You play through several separate assignments, and in each assignment, you are given a different type of task, meet different people, and have a (for the genre) pretty high degree of freedom in your choices. While each task can play out in several different ways, each new assignment presents a (mostly) clean slate, and this structure enables the game to spin the story into many different directions during one assignment without losing itself in messy contingencies in the long run.
The game also keeps track of your decisions. How you treated a client in one case, may affect their reaction to you when you meet them again in another. The game ends in a grand finale where you have many options to proceed, but which ones will work (and which ones won't) depends on your decisions throughout the game. This is a remarkable difference between this modern CYOA and classics like the "Fighting Fantasy" series. Those classics were actual books, so the amount of tracking of previous decisions was very limited. Gameplay often just consisted of avoiding instadeaths and finding the "correct" path. In Choice of the Deathless, you can succeed in many different ways, but you have to "prepare" the type of success you're after, with the decisions that you take throughout the game.
The writing is on a much higher level than classic CYOAs (which, to be frank, never rose beyond "serviceable"). The author shows an extensive vocabulary, and their descriptive passages are sometimes quite evocative. Their matter-of-factly style works well in legal disputes, but feels displaced and somewhat clumsy when they try their hand at romance scenes. The one thing that really kept throwing me off though, is their apparent disdain for words like "is", "are", or "have". They are using contractions wherever possible, and arguably also in many cases where they _aren't_ possible. Constructs like "Your mouth's dry" or "You've no time" appear very frequently. Using these particular contractions for the _main_ verb (not an auxiliary) in a sentence feels very unnatural to me, if not outright wrong. As a result, I was constantly tripping over sentences, the text never seemed to just "flow". The "is" contractions were especially problematic, since words like "mouth's" look like a possessive noun - and if you read it as such, you then have to internally reprocess the sentence after finding out that your initial reading doesn't work. While that only takes a fraction of a second, it does disturb the flow of the prose.
In short, reading the author's sentences felt a bit like driving a sports car that keeps stuttering every 30 seconds. You feel like the car _should_ be able to provide a smooth ride, and the 29 seconds between each stutter give you every indication that it could, but it just doesn't.
The game does not have any illustrations or sounds, nor does it need any. It offers ways to change the text size or background color, and you can resize the game window in any way you want (though fullscreen display is not implemented, you'll always see the top bar of the window). The game works fine with the mouse, all you have to do is click on your desired choice. Alternatively, selections can be made with a combination of Tab, Space, and the arrow keys, though this is a little clunky because you have to press Tab several times until the selection box comes into focus, and then once more to select the "Next" box, which you can activate with Space. But generally this is a game that can be played very well by people with various disabilities that make other games difficult to control.
A manual save system is, unfortunately, missing. The game autosaves after every choice you make, but just keeps overwriting the same save file. This means that you can't just go back if you misunderstood a choice or even just misclicked, there's no "undo" function either. If you want to explore different paths, you have to restart the game from scratch. This is not a huge problem since the story is varied enough to make that enjoyable, but a bit more user-friendliness in this regard would have been appreciated.
I recommend Choice of the Deathless to players who like CYOA gamebooks where choices really matter, especially if they are looking for a higher level of writing than the classics provide. I also recommend it to players interested in exploring worlds where demons, gods, and magic are "normal" and parts of legal proceedings. Be aware of the author's stylistic idiosyncrasies though. But the game is so cheap that I'd suggest giving it a shot if any of the above appeals to you.
