Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ fantasy books? Well, now they’re coming back in this delightfully chonky e-ink console

No good thing ever dies, Stephen King once wrote, and while he was talking about hope, the saying could well be applied to the hugely popular ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books from the 1980/1990s. That’s because one person has decided to revisit the magic of those books and old-school text-based RPGs, by inventing a bespoke e-ink handheld device for reading and gaming.

Although I got my first computer at a relatively young age, games in the 1980s weren’t especially cheap and so much of my pocket money was spent on acquiring a series of books known as ‘Choose Your Own Adventure.’ If you’ve never heard of them before, think of them as being a roleplaying game, where each page describes a location or event, before giving you options about what you can do next.