WILL YOU PLAY A PURE-TEXT CYOA NOVEL?

I'm not really familiar with this genre, so you should take what I say with a grain of salt ): But in any case, here's what I think:

You'd need some really great writing and/or ideas to propel it forward. Personally I wouldn't be very interested if it works in exactly the same way as a choice VN without the V. Random game over after choosing between cheese and a knife? No thank you.

If you do create a game like this it would be nice to make sure each decision/action counts for something in the end, like all those personality tests floating around the web. People are constantly doing them because they expect that clicking a series of multiple choice answers will unveil some great revelation about what type of person they are or about human nature in general. If you can incorporate that concept then that might be pretty cool.

For example, let's say you're doing a horror dungeon story and the player starts with a series of neutral options. If they consistently choose gritty/disturbing options in the beginning, the story could flow towards much darker and insane stuff until it reaches a horrible finale, playing upon the fact that the player chose to go evil. On the other hand, if they attempt to do morally correct things, it seems obvious they're a goody two-shoes so you can make them suffer by forcing them to make increasingly morally-compromising decisions (where it's much easier to do the wrong thing, but being that they're good they attempt the 'right' thing even though it makes life more difficult for them).

Basically, to make it interesting (for people like me, at least), do make the adventure about real choice, not about a linear story with artificial choices such as "Guess which way is the right way!" or "Guess what magic words you need to type in here lolol!"

Good luck either way!

For sure! I've actually seen a lot of really well-done CYOA stuff recently due to Twine being discovered as a great way to make and export them to webpages. It might be worth checking out.

Anyway, CYOA games are all about the writing. If you're looking to tune up your writing skills, that's the way to go! They might not get any sort of attention for visuals, but they're a great way to practice writing, make something quickly, and they're a lot of fun.

Yeah, I used to play interactive fiction before. Fun times. If done correctly, interactive fiction can be just as interesting. If anything, it allow players to have more imagination than video games.

The only downside of interactive fiction though is that since it's pure words, those who don't like reading chunks of text on the computer screen will be dissuaded from it. So it's important that you know how to motivate players purely through writing.