Choices: Stories You Play Releases First Ever LGBTQ+ Story

Created by Pixelberry Studios, Choices: Stories You Play releases “All of Us,” its first fully LGBTQ+ story for their VIP users. Other players can play the new games in September.

Founded by Oliver Miao, Keith Emmett, and Winston She, Pixelberry Studios has been around for over a decade. The company created Surviving High School and Cause of Death, “two of the first episodic games to hit the top 25 top across all app stores.” Pixelberry pivoted into more interactive games like High School Story, Hollywood U, and Choices.

Since 2016, Choices has become a hit in the interactive story genre, as the app has over 100 million downloads and has generated 544 million dollars. The app has hundreds of original stories that are “enjoyed by millions of players around the world.”

Recently, the mobile game studio has been acquired by Series Entertainment, a game development company. Series wants to “build out its studio system to deliver a diverse catalog of different genres that leverage its world-class development technology, the Rho Engine.” The engine is “the world’s first AI-native, multimodal full-stack game creation platform.”

Pany Haritatos, the co-founder and CEO of Series Entertainment, believes that “Pixelberry has been a category leader in the interactive fiction genre. We love story-based games and Choices has long been a leader in the genre. With our cutting-edge technology, we take Choices to the next level, with bigger books, new interactive features, and ever-improving story quality, all designed to deliver the things the Choices community wants.”

According to the Pixelberry blog, the studio is excited about this acquisition as it will allow them to “bring to life a lot of our top fan requests, such as genre diversity, multiple love interests, main character customization, and more intricate story branches.”

On June 18, the Choices writers gave fans an early sneak peek at “All of Us” in their blog. According to Olivia, this book “focuses specifically on queer characters and puts those relationships and experiences front and center.” The writers wanted to put a real emphasis on “found family.” Throughout “All of Us,” characters will find their support network while going through their queer journey.

This book is special to the Pixelberry writers because they want players to see queer characters “happy and thriving” to help them with their discoveries. However, the writers are not trying to “encapsulate the entire queer experience in a single story.” They want to be authentic to all LGBTQ+ people and “tried to find a balance between player expression and side characters with a variety of identities.”

The writers also decided to “create a unique experience that would let specific kinds of fashion shine.”

The “All of Us” authors were kind enough to give fans more behind-the-scenes information. The official synopsis reads: “Our main characters work at a queer-owned cafe in San Francisco where you and your friends are trying to make ends meet. If you play your cards right, you just might have a shot with that cute regular you’ve been crushing on.”

“All of Us” is the first Choices book of two books. Players choose between two main characters that live parallel but have different storylines. Regardless of which book players choose, “each main character and their love interest appear in both books.”

Some new characters include Brad, Tess, Blue, Allan, Max, Mateo, and Yaz, among many others. Brad is a jock who channels positive masculinity and has a dog named Elvis.

Tess is a nerd who loves to drive her motorcycle.

Blue is “the most chaotic friend in your group who is also beloved by the whole team. Ironically, the ally character is named Allan.

The Pixelberry writers hope that their queer players “can see pieces of themselves in every part of this book. For our players who are questioning, I hope this helps you on your journey of self-discovery. And for our non-queer players, I hope you walk away with a new perspective on life and love.”

Fans can check out “All of Us” on Choices: Stories You Play this month. You can download the app on the Google Play and Apple App Store.