A fine specimen of healthy, young manhood to sell for a good price in Egypt!

I’m not especially religious, though I did have a Christian upbringing. Christian entertainment (and faith-based entertainment in general) really kinda deserves its reputation of being Bible study in disguise. I have to wonder how many times a Christian-themed book or game was pitched by someone who actually had a fun idea in mind, only to have it whitewashed into boring gospel-spewing by the publishers. Or if all faith-tainment creators are really that droll in the first place.

In fact, that’s what I’m calling the genre: faith-tainment. It’s not always Christian. I remember seeing a Jewish Candyland game in a store window called Kosherland. Christians get a bad rap for this kind of stuff, probably because theirs is so prominent in the USA, but you can find faith-tainment of all flavors that’s equally cringey, weird, or strangely awesome.

So whenever I see Christian board games, video games, or books that try something different, it catches my curiosity. It’s almost like I have this never-ending side-quest that only seldom pops up, where the goal is to find that rare instance of faith-tainment that’s actually engaging. From what I’ve seen of the Decide Your Own Adventure books so far, this might be as close as it gets.

Decide Your Own Adventure is, in short, Choose Your Own Bible Adventure. A series of nearly a dozen books based on the concept of traveling through time on the dopest time machine ever: a flaming chariot drawn by a talking space-horse. Your missions always have to do with studying and researching figures from the Bible in real time, while trying not to interfere and disrupt the timeline. Some of the questions that your missions mean to answer are genuinely interesting, like “Why did Elijah order the deaths of 450 priests of Baal?” or “Were all the prophets chosen by God or were some of them charlatans?”

Your mission in The Dreamer isn’t quite as cool. All we’re meant to do is figure out whatever Joseph had in common with Daniel and Jesus. Not a lot of intrigue there, but I let it slide because Joseph’s story is probably my favorite (Samson the Bible Hercules is pretty boss, though.)

I had hoped that I would get to influence the outcome of the story and botch the timeline irreparably, but sadly there are no “game over” scenarios in The Dreamer, since you’re disallowed from interfering. The only influence the reader has on the story is which scenes you visit in which order, and your choices might lead to you skipping scenes with important revelations. You do get to talk to people, and even get pushed around by Josephs mean ol’ stepbrothers. And the narrator does ask questions that might get you in trouble at Bible Camp, like when he points out that Young Joseph is a bit of a pampered, clueless brat, and it’s no wonder his stepbrothers resent him.

Still, leaving a dumb kid in a well to starve to death just because he’s spoiled? That’s pretty crazy in my book. Just beat him up and leave it at that like normal brothers would, you buncha psychos.

Also, I have to wonder: for not wanting to be married to Leah, Jacob had an awful lot of kids with her. He only had Joseph and Benjamin with the love of his life. Another question that might get you in trouble at Bible Camp. Probably why I never went.

What the book lacks in reader interactivity, it makes up for with great artwork and an engaging way to present old Bible stories. The art is crisp, clean, and detailed, and the people are pretty expressive. And I have to admit, if my parents were going to push Bible study on me, this is much better than making me read dry, boring scripture from the Bible itself. Here there’s at least an effort to pull the reader in and make them feel involved.

I can’t help wondering if Susan E Hilliard wanted to do more with this series than just have the reader be an observer. Why can’t I rescue Joseph from the well and then see how awful the famine turns out sans his influence as Pharaoh’s sidekick? Or have me share Joseph’s fate as a slave of the Pharaoh and try to mount a daring escape? At least give me the opportunity to botch carrying Joseph’s bones and watch in horror and embarrassment as they spill down the side of a cliff. A little irreverence helps relieve the tension sometimes. My dad used to add captions to the pictures in his Bible, for crying out loud. Maybe that’s where I got that habit from…

I can’t really recommend books like The Dreamer to casual readers. I might point a gamebook completist in their direction. If I recommend this book to anyone, it’s Christian kids who find the Bible itself too dull to read. This is a pretty great tool for telling the best Bible stories to readers of any age, especially kids, without making it feel quite so much like homework. And it encourages the reader to question what they’re witnessing, even if they can’t affect it.

Me, I couldn’t make it through the book of Genesis. So I guess I’d recommend it to people like me, too. If you want to know the stories in the Bible, but can’t sit through the dry text of the Good Book itself, see if you can get your hands on one of these. Good luck, too, ‘cos they’re not easy to come by.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.