Netflix Is Introducing a "Choose Your Own Ending" Feature For Kids

Remember those amazing Give Yourself Goosebumps books in which you could pick the direction the story went — "choose your own scare" — by flipping to a certain page? Well, get ready for a hit of nostalgia, because that type of choose-your-own-adventure-story model is coming to Netflix this month in the form of an "Interactive Storytelling" feature.

The first show, Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale (based off Puss in Boots), releases June 20, 2017, and contains several choices within the episode — which will prompt kids to interact with the show by either using the arrows on the TV remote or by using a tablet's touchscreen to make their selection between two choices — that could result in around 3,000 different story combinations. I got to try the feature firsthand and am here to say that the ability to change up what Puss does (will he fight his enemies valiantly or chit-chat with them over tea?) is seriously fun, and I can only imagine that as a kid I'd want to watch and rewatch this episode a million times just to see every possible story combination.

With this amazing feature, your kids will get to feel like they've had a hand in what their favorite characters actually do on screen (rather than be asked a rhetorical "What should we do next?" question in a situation that they can't actually control. Looking at you, Dora!), making interactive storytelling a good middle-of-the-road solution between reading a book and sitting on the iPad with Netflix shows all day.

Although Netflix will roll out this feature with just Puss in Book to start, the company already has another episode with the characters from Buddy Thunderstruck (which reminded me of a kid version of Talladega Nights or something Danny McBride would write and star in) — called Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile — slated to hit the platform with the interactive feature July 14.

As Netflix says in the above video, "Hold on to your remotes," people . . . this is seriously cool stuff.