Lessons from Zymo - the necessity of a gameplay loop

TW: the game i'm reviewing is about body horror, which i’m not discussing in depth and leaving in the footnotes anyway if you wanna skip them, but be warned~! Also, naturally, spoilers for the mechanics of Zymo. I’ll leave info about the plot as sparse as I possibly can, as I’ll do anything in my power to not deter you from buying this book, god it’s so good. So recently - not really recently, but i'm a slow blogger - i got my hands on what I can now confidently claim is my favorite RPG-adjacent book yet: Zymo, by Nalsco. Essentially, it's a choose-your-own adventure book, and it self-describes as “Openworld Viticultural Bodyhorror”. For the purposes of this review, what interests me most is the mechanics that make the game work as well as it does, so i'll mainly discuss the first part of that three-part statement, and try to answer the question: Why Should a Choose-Your-Own Adventure Book Be “Open-World”?The classic format of a choose-your-own adventure book is linear. Each event…