Choose your own adventure in Netflix’s ‘Puss’
Children’s series merges interactivity with storytelling
Puss in Boots has just met several scary monsters. Will he fight them valiantly, or have tea with them? You decide.
Netflix on Tuesday unveiled an “interactive storytelling ” episode of the children’s series that lets viewers choose, at various points, where the story will go. The “branching narrative” of Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale is reminiscent of the classic Choose
Your Own Adventure book series, popularized in the 1980s and ’90s, in which young readers were the protagonists of the story, and their choices sent them to different pages to read the outcome.
So how does the Netflix version of this storytelling device measure up?
The interactive Puss episode finds the cat trapped in a magic storybook. Puss and the villainous narrator both offer their own suggestions at each crossroads, but kids can only pick on certain devices (the Netflix website, Android devices, Chromecast and Apple TV are not among them). On an iPhone or iPad, which is where I sampled it, the choices are made by tapping one of two options onscreen; on a TV, a remote control does the trick.
The flow is not quite as streamlined as you would hope. There is a noticeable pause between scenes after choices have been made, or when returning to the main screen to pick another route. And when the choices play out on screen, the show occasionally gives itself a do-over for narrative expediency, showing first the “wrong ” and then the “right” options to keep the story going.
But overall, the experience is genuinely fun. The choices are well-paced within the short episode. There’s enough time for a full scene to play out, but you’re never left wondering when you’ll get to make a big decision again. And Puss in Book has fun subverting your expectations. The ostensibly “good” choice often turns out badly for poor Puss: When the cat wishes for riches from a genie, he is crushed under a literal mountain of gold, which is then promptly stolen.
The interactive doesn’t detract from the charm of the Puss in
Boots character or the series,
which has appeared on the streaming service for four seasons. It still mixes action with jokes aimed at both kids and the adults watching with them. The episode even finds time for a “lame stream media” joke — if your adventure takes you there.
Two other of Netflix’s kidsshow episodes — Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile (July 14) and Stretch Armstrong: The
Breakout (2018) — will use the technology.
Interactive storytelling is probably best kept in children’s programming for now, as it requires simple stories that don’t spin out of control as the viewer makes choices. A choose-your-own
House of Cards could get messy. In its current form, the Netflix model captures some of what made the Choose Your Own Ad
venture books special. It’s much harder to accidentally kill Puss than it was to accidentally kill yourself in the old books. The cat has to return for more episodes, after all.