Looking at the diagram, it’s not hard to see which one Packard’s having more fun with. The trunk of the Past branch, in which you tag along with a Neanderthal tribe, feels all Land of Opportunity (and, indeed, presents the most meaningful choices).
This matches up rather neatly with the content: the future is dominated by a dystopian, The Machine Stops hedonic paradise, Suprema 87, full of compulsion and disappointment.
The left-hand, future branch is trimmed by a lot more losing endings, has only one (rather mixed) non-losing ending, but does allow you to jump back into the Cave of Time and go to the past. Of the two main branches, the right-hand one (travel to the past) is much bushier and contains considerably more winning endings. Well, there’s certainly a lot of no-choice jumps here. The moral content is more prominent, more punishing and makes more decisions on your behalf the protagonist’s feelings about things are often articulated, often without much player input. This last makes things feel a bit more constrained: when you’re on a Triangle Trade slave ship or getting caught up in the Mutiny on the Bounty, it’s fairly clear (at least, from an adult’s perspective) that you won’t be able to appreciably change history and that therefore your story is rather tightly determined. Although you’d be hard-pressed to call it educational, the historical content has a bit more actual research behind it - at least, enough that it doesn’t feel totally ad-libbed. Return to the Cave of Time, Choose Your Own Adventure #50, Edward Packard, 1985Ī book aimed at a slightly older audience than the original Cave of Time: the prose is rather more verbose, and the illustrations depict the protagonist as a gangly early-teen. Still, the company seems to have developed and abided by a structural house style, as it did with tone, content and motifs like the Cave. Part of this might have been the natural shape of divergence: Sugarcane Island and The Cave of Time are such strong examples of their type of CYOA that there wasn’t much room for variation in that direction.
Montgomery (who I should look at separately at some point) in particular seems to have preferred more linear, constrained plots with lots of no-choice jumps. The Cave of Time was among the most beloved of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but it wasn’t enormously typical of the series.
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