Honestly, a lot of them were really crap at the whole “choosing” thing, with many books just summarily killing the protagonist if they strayed from one or two paths. The better ones offered significant branching. Kinda funnily, by far the best CYOA books I ever ran across were a spin off of the Goosebumps books. While the writing was as pedestrian as the original books, it had a feature that made them excellent CYOAs: each page had the reader turn to a completely different part of the book for the next passage. Even when no choices were being made on that page. That made it really difficult to “cheat” by looking at different decisions and then flipping back if I didn’t like the result. I recall that a few of these books had paths I never found, something I only discovered by reading through the book lineally and finding pages I’d never seen.

CYOA was a massive fad in the late 80s/early 90s. I don’t mention much other stuff since I primarily experienced it through FF, but I’ve realised the genre was far bigger than *just* FF. Very much a product of its time, though – I often wonder what would happen if you sat a kid today down with a CYOA book.

What’s the point in unlocking new routes if it’s hard to fulfill conditions anyway? Sounds cheap.