question concerning making a basic-ish game

GameMaker Studio (can't say it's a great tool or anything, just putting it out there) allows you to put stuff together pretty quickly following tutorials.

I've used it to make a pseudo game for my kids (their ideas, my code/development ability) and I was pleased overall, but I found their scripting to be a bit confusing at first.

Yeah, doing things with HTML pages is...well, freaking awful. That's not to insult your younger self (you work with the tools you know), but there are roughly eighty bazillion better ways to do a simple choose-your-own-adventure kind of game.

Now, you can use a package like GameMaker, and I can attest that this works pretty well. If you really want to learn some flexibility, though, it's a great idea to actually pick up a language. Lots of people learn PHP because it's easy...it's also inelegant, makes for pretty messy code, and is super easy to hack. Python is pretty good as well, but has plenty of limitations...but for choose-your-own-adventure, it should work well, especially if we're just talking about text.

I might suggest learning F#, which is a greatly simplified language when compared to C# (although that's honestly not that hard to learn, either). It's a great stepping-stone to more pro-level stuff like C#, and you can use free tools like vscode to work with it and learn it. If you become more advanced, you can always step up to using full Visual Studio later on, but vscode is now considered one of the best editors out there (it's made by Microsoft, but is used by tons of non-Microsoft developers simply because it's free, stable, and has tons of great features). In fact, you can use it as your editor for any of the languages that I've suggested.

Regardless, learning a real programming language will allow you to store the player's choices in real attributes or arrays so that they can be accessed from anywhere in the program (rather than loading some super-specific page in your HTML model). I learned GWBASIC when I was a kid, and used it to write a whole slew of choose-your-own-adventure games, then moved up to writing more complex, Zork-like text adventures and ASCII or CGA/EGA video games. Learning a language definitely ups your ability to create what you want.

Twine is your best option if you don't want to learn / make anything too complex. You could also go with Ren'Py and make it some kind of VN, but it would probably require a bit of knowledge about Python.