The easiest way to describe 2120, written and illustrated by George Wylesol, is that it is a modern “Choose Your Own Adventure” comic book, but it is also so much more.

For those who don’t know, a Choose Your Own Adventure book is what kids used to do before sandbox computer games. You would enter a magical or science fiction world and go on an adventure where you got to decide what you did, and when you did it. All of this was held within the tight constraints of an orchestrated plot and meticulous narrative planning. With very few rules, you would start at page one and decide how the story unfolded by picking one of the few options you were given. Each option led to a different page within the book, and once you had flicked forward, there was no going back. That is, unless you placed a bookmark at the previous page, or made a note of the route you had taken. But that was cheating, and you were only cheating yourself.

The most famous series of Choose Your Own Adventures are probably the Fighting Fantasy series created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston. The first title, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, was released in 1983 and spawned a magnificent, long running series. But other options were available, and over the years I personally have owned and played books based on Asterix the Gaul, Transformers, Indiana Jones, and a collection of non-franchise related titles.

Jump forward to 2022, and Avery Hill Publishing released George Wylesol’s 2120, a new kind of Choose Your Own Adventure that incorporates the Escape Room culture that has grown in recent years, and the booming graphic novel market.

The book was released in English and Italian within the same year, but as you go through the book, you will realise that its themes and uncomfortable fears are almost universal. If you’ve ever worked in or been to a small company’s office in a nondescript town or city, you will instantly recognise the setting. But even if you haven’t been to such a place, the creepy, unnerving, desolate atmosphere that Wylesol brings to his illustrations will definitely hit a spot, and not one you’d necessarily want hit.

Wylesol’s art is linear in form, almost clinical, especially for the office and its internal corridors of the book. The world that he puts you in is created from delicate straight lines, with forced perspective and flat, unassuming colour fields. The spaces are very well designed and fit on each page to give the impression of a first person shooter vido game, but without the dread of alien creatures or blood thirsty gangsters hiding behind every corner. No, in 2120 there is a different type of dread, one of oppressive blandness, a claustrophobic nightmare where the endless, featureless, corridors stretch out before you in a never-ending labyrinth of inactivity. The initial suggestion that you have a choice over what you do and where you go seems to dissipate within the first few choices, as the banality of an empty office becomes apparent. If you’ve ever had to work late as an administrator, then this early part of the book will claw out those nightmares of being alone in corporate blandness.

The colouring throughout 2120 is important to the atmosphere that Wylesol is creating. The walls are bleached peach or faded beige, and the floor has a distinctive dark green that is the very definition of flat. There is no depth or texture to most of the setting, making it sterile and uncomfortable, like being in the waiting room of an old hospital building. Wylesol doesn’t want the reader to feel comfortable within this “adventure,” but the cliche of dark uninviting spaces is completely reversed here. Each corridor and adjoining room appears well lit to emphasize the lack of fixtures, fitting, and—above all—characters. There is so much emptiness in this book that whenever you turn to a page with something that isn’t a wall or a door, you find yourself examining it very closely. It must be a clue, must be important in some way to explaining what is going on. If you are the type of person who makes notes while reading, you’ll be making many notes. And that is something that I would encourage as you read/play this book. It’s not often that you would recommend note making while reading a comic, but in this instance it will prove useful.

One of the things that you will discover quite quickly is that you have to go everywhere and not just blindly keep going forward. I found myself constantly moving backwards through corridors I’d just walked up, just to check on that vent in the previous room in case it held something important. In some Choose Your Own Adventure books, you can miss huge sections of the adventure and still reach a satisfying conclusion. This makes the book re-playable, and the handfuls of pages that you skip past as you play acts as an invitation to re-read. With 2120, almost the opposite is true. As this has much more of an Escape Room feel to it, every single aspect is important, and as a reader you don’t want to miss anything. It acts as a standard graphic novel, forcing you to read all of the pages, but they just happen not to be in the correct order. There is a mind numbing puzzle hidden beneath the pages and pages of numbered doors and almost empty rooms.

I could speak of the narrative that you form as you work through this book but, to be honest, that’s for you to discover. I will say that a number of the page turns were terrifying and I began to get a Shining feel as I ventured further into the depths of the office. Wylesol matches the narrative to his visual design which creates a paradoxically engaging graphic novel where, for the most part, nothing happens. It will suck you in and steal your time.

Touching on philosophical experiences, the banality of corporate architectural design, and modern agnosiophobia, 2120 is a superbly constructed modern take on the interactive novel. George Wylesol’s illustrative style is a fresh aesthetic that has more in common with Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage than it does your average weekly comic book release which will make it especially appealing to some readers. It is a work of art and it makes you work for the art. I highly recommend it, especially if you fancy something different from the medium.