Majotori

It used to be that trivia games were boring affairs where everything needed to be spelled correctly and the computer would type gibberish for no reason. But as the 20th century drew to a close, we started to see more developers experiment with different ways to ask pop culture questions. From the sarcastic nature of You Don't Know Jack to the fake television game show of Buzz to Microsoft hawking Scene It? on Xbox 360, there have been no shortages of unique trivia games released over the last two decades. Now you can add Majotori to that list, as this clever little quiz takes everything we love about answering pointless questions and turns it into something completely original.

Think of this as the trivia game version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It's a single-player quiz that sees a trivia-loving witch named Lariat interfere with a bunch of people's lives in an attempt to grant wishes and make their lives better. It's actually really simple: She'll ask you a series of nine questions, and depending on how well you do, the witch will either grant the wish or make the character's life a whole lot worse.

There's the story of Woolie, an uninspired slacker who plays video games all day and wishes to become a famous YouTuber. Then there's Kony, who finds an injured deer in the woods and desperately wants to nurse it back to health. On a similar theme, Oliver is a dog that barks into the night and hopes to one day hear the moon bark back. And don't forget about Princess Ava, who is sad that she's not loved and respected like the people she reads about in fairytales. And then there's Paca, an elderly woman who spends her days watching soap operas and worrying that the writers are going to screw up the big wedding scene.

Whether trivial or life-changing, Lariat is always there to offer the same deal: She'll grant the wish after the people play a short quiz. But there's a catch. It's not enough to simply get the questions right, because at the end of the round, the witch will turn your correct and wrong answers into Xs and Os, place them in a big circle and spin them around like a game of roulette. If it lands on an O, the wish will be granted and you can move on to the next story. However, land on the X and bad things happen.

Because of the roulette angle, the only way to guarantee a happy ending is if you get all nine questions right. Even if you get seven or eight right answers, there's still a chance you'll land on the X and ruin that person's life forever. Sometimes that doesn't matter and the outcomes aren't all that important, but there are a few wishes that end up being the difference between life and death. In the case of the suicidal Tsubasa, she'll either be granted wings and fly away from her troubled life ... or she'll fall 50 stories and never be heard from again.

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This $6 package comes with more than a thousand questions that fit into a few simple categories -- Video Games, Animation, Cinema and a Miscellaneous group that covers everything from history to world geography. While I'm pretty good at most of those categories, I quickly realized that I have no experience with anime, and found myself constantly guessing whenever those questions came up. Thankfully, you can limit the categories you're bad at, giving the more than two dozen characters a fighting chance to have their wish successfully granted.

As a quiz game, Majotori is fun but limited. You're not playing against other people and the questions are straight-forward with multiple choice answers. However, as stories go, I was fascinated in seeing what would happen with each character. There are more than 50 branching paths, and I had a lot of fun seeing the possible outcomes play out in the minimalist cinema scenes. There's nothing earth-shaking happening here, but the charming visuals and pop culture questions held my attention for quite a while.

Though it probably works better as a mobile or tablet experience, Majotori is a delightful little quiz game with a nice range of questions and a fun theme. The roulette elements can occasionally be maddening and I wish there was a little more variety to the categories, but this is a trivia game with an original concept and a fun art style. It's one of the few quiz games that actually tells a story, and that alone is more than enough for me to recommend Majotori.