By 1983 we already had the ongoing Endless Quest series of interactive fiction, choose your own adventure style books, but by the end of the year, in November, the first four volumes of HeartQuest would come out, with two more coming out in 1984. This is a new, and short-lived, series of D&D interactive fiction targeting a different demographic from the Endless Quest books.

HeartQuest mixes adventure and romance to create a product squarely aimed at teenage girls, the protagonist of this novel, Chandelle, is a 14 year old girl, an apprentice to her jeweller father, who gets waylaid while travelling with him, and he ends up getting kidnapped. Chandelle must save her father and she can do this with the help of a couple of guys she might meet along the way, and which she can end up romancing.

In a way kind of prefiguring the Bioware computer games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, where romance is an important part of the plot, you get to choose which boyfriend you want here or if you want a boyfriend at all. You also have some choices, will you go for the noble but hapless Knight wanna be or the dark bad boy mercenary, who is also 25 years old, while you’re 14 (only in the 80s!) ? Fun to see TSR trying out new things and trying to appeal to new audiences, definitely worth checking out!