A choose your own adventure app you play by walking
Choose your own adventure, on foot
In the books, you reached the bottom of a page and chose. Open the door: turn to page 47. Run: turn to page 112. Interactive fiction apps kept the idea and swapped the page for a tap. reTrek’s quests keep it too, with one change. You do not turn the page. You walk to it.
A quest is a story told in chapters along a road, and each chapter waits at the end of a stretch of real walking. Your phone counts your steps as you go about your day, through Apple Health or Health Connect, and when you have walked far enough the next chapter opens as a short film. Then, now and then, the story stops and asks you what to do.
How a quest works
- Walk to read on. Each chapter sits at the end of a stretch of road, a few kilometres long. Walk it, at any pace, in one go or across a day of errands, and the chapter unlocks.
- Make the calls. At the forks, you choose. Your choice decides which stretch of road you walk next, and some choices change how quickly the story moves under your feet.
- Beat the clock. Some chapters are challenges: walk a set distance before time runs out. Make it, or don’t, and the story goes on differently either way.
- Find the endings. Every quest has several endings, and which one you reach depends on everything you chose and every challenge you made or missed. When you finish, you keep a story card for that ending, and walking the quest again is the way to find the others.
An example: The Sealed Letter
Southern France, 1348. A physician presses a sealed letter into a young man’s hand. It must reach the Pope at Avignon. The road runs from Marseille through the Comtat Venaissin: stone villages, olive groves, a river to cross. The physician did not say what was inside. He did say it was a matter of life and death.
Your steps are the messenger’s. A few kilometres in, the story asks its first question, the kind it keeps asking: someone on the road needs help. Help him to the village, or keep walking? The letter is urgent. So, it seems, is he. What happens next depends on what you pick, and on the road you walk because of it.
The Sealed Letter is free, for good, with no trial.
And another
The Garden Gate is set in the Kingdom of Naples in the early 1800s. Imperial soldiers arrive at a village inn asking about a woman, and you run to warn her. She has a bag packed. She doesn’t explain. The road leads south through hill towns and coastal paths to the port of Salerno, and she knows exactly where she is going. You don’t know why. It is part of reTrek PRO, with every other quest and route.
The walking is the point
reTrek is also an app for walking famous routes, Everest Base Camp, the Inca Trail, the Camino, one step at a time, and the quests come from the same idea: the hardest part of walking every day is having a reason to go out again tomorrow. A story you can only continue on foot is a very good reason. If you have ever stayed up for one more chapter, this is the same pull, aimed at your evening walk.
Start The Sealed Letter for free on iPhone or Android.