With its riddle and puzzle gameplay, Device 6 is more Le Grand Meaulnes than Grand Theft Auto. “It’s got a pretty slow pace,” explains Simon Flesser of Simogo, the small Swedish studio that developed the game. “It doesn’t have the instant gratification that many games have. This is something that you play and take your time to digest.” Like a book? “Like a book.”

Slow and wordy—hardly the recipe for a smash hit. Yet Device 6 has sold well, even at a relatively expensive $3.99. Released on October 17th, the game made Editor’s Choice in the App Store and reached second on the overall app chart in the US. At a time when most apps are sold “freemium,” with users getting the core product free and paying to unlock add-ons, its success proves the existence of a market for quality text-based games.

Other new gaming apps are working a literary angle. Type:Rider, a game by French developer Cosmografik, has the unique distinction of being the first game played from the point of view of a punctuation mark. In Stride and Prejudice, an animated Elizabeth Bennet runs and leaps over the text of Pride and Prejudice. Within 24 hours of its release, the game had jumped to 14th place in the Education category of the App Store.

Gaming isn't about to go all-literary just yet. Fighting and running to the next fight remain gamers' favorite forms of activity—and as long as that’s the case, literary games will be a niche interest. The true legacy of games such as Device 6 is more likely to be in book publishing. For an industry in a state of flux, these apps mark a path to follow. They might even change the way people read altogether.

For all their noises about exploring and expanding the market, publishing companies have been slow to embrace the possibilities of interactive texts. “We're becoming a progressively more digital industry, a digital company, but that's because we're mirroring our business in digital,” says Dan Franklin, digital publisher at Random House. “We are a digital company in that sense, but we're not publishing much digitally native work.”

Franklin is responsible for one of the more intriguing developments in publishing this year. Working with debut author Rob Sherman and developer Failbetter Games, he put out Black Crown, a free-to-play web game formed almost entirely of text. Not since the glory days of the 1980s, when Choose Your Own Adventure books sold in the hundreds of millions and future US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky penned the text-based computer game Mindwheel, has interactive fiction had such mainstream interest. “It's a thrilling time to be working on this stuff,” says Failbetter co-founder and Chief Narrative Officer Alexis Kennedy.

For Random House, which recently merged with Penguin to create the world’s largest book company, the move was a first foray into gaming. “We put ourselves out on a limb with it,” Franklin says.