Freida McFadden’s The Dinner Party employs a branching narrative structure that recalls the “Choose Your Own Adventure” gamebooks. This series, created by Edward Packard and primarily published by Bantam Books, reached peak popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, empowering young readers with narrative control (“The Rise & Fall & Rise of Choose Your Own Adventure Books.” YouTube, uploaded by Secret Galaxy, 21 Oct. 2021). Its return fits within a broader wave of millennial nostalgia, as familiar childhood formats and franchises from the same era continue to be revived, reworked, and marketed to adults.

In recent years, branching storytelling has been adapted across different media for both younger and mature audiences. Netflix’s 2018 interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch brought branching storytelling to mainstream streaming audiences as part of a broader wave of interactive media titles released in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Around the same period, Netflix released several choice-based specials for different audiences, including Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale, Minecraft: Story Mode, Captain Underpants Epic Choice-o-Rama, and Escape the Undertaker. Video games have used similar structures for much longer, with role-playing series like Bioware’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect and XBox Game Studios’ Fable allowing player choices to shape relationships, moral outcomes, and endings.