The Bookwalker was mildly disappointing. Not greatly, midly. Its setting and premise offered a promise the game couldnt really live up to but it remains a perfectly serviceable game. Im not entirely sure what it is the game messes up but I think I can elucidate a few reasons why I might feel this way.
If you played the demo like I did you might have been excited at the promise it showed. Half first person adventure in the house of a writer who is serving 30 years for an initally unknown crime, half isometric adventure game "atoning" for said crime by entering novels to extract certain artifacts ; hence the title : The Bookwalker.
In this fictional setting original works are no longer produced, the ability to enter worlds and manipulate them (as well as the scheme we are involved in removing elements from certain books to be transplanted into others for the benefit of subpar writers) has led to all new works being highly derivative of each other. And whilst I wouldnt say this is where the game's cleverness ends, it certainly is where it peaks.
I think the biggest missed opportunity is the fact that the novels we enter into are all entirely fictional. Obviously they are fictional since they are novels but what I mean is that they are made up by the writer of the game, they are not real. Its perhaps understandeable that making the novels fictional offers greater lattitude in setting up the various puzzles which the writer can choose entirely but I just cant help but think what a much better game it would be if we were entering the altered versions of classic works! Surely that would also greatly enhance the point of creativity being dead and new works being derivative. There would be a lot of mileage in exploring these works from new angles and clever puzzles somewhat based on an understanding of the original works.
Perhaps copyright law is to blame, there arent all that many novels in the public domain written after 1910 or so but even with older works I still feel it would have made an overall more solid experience.
The in-universe novels arent devoid of cleverness - there are themes of greed, the point of fiction, theres a climate change analogy in one of them and the last chapter I found particularly compelling in its setting but I think the game's second biggest misstep is that for a game about literature its characters are not very compelling nor does it have all that much to say beyond the surface level. The two main characters are not likeable or even very interesting and all the characters in the novels suffer from being 1. only shown in their specific chapters so there's not much time to flesh them out and 2. They are supposed to be 1 dimensional literally in-universe because the books you are stealing from were written by hack writers! Which is the lamest goddamned excuse I have seen to make the somewhat unrealistic function-as-personality that NPCs often have in videogames seem clever. There is also a running storyline through the game that touches up to danganronpa V3 in terms of its themes but without wishing to spoil, its resolution felt very unearned to me.
I have spent a lot of time railing on this game but in all honesty I didnt hate it. Its insubstantiality is also its greatest ally as the pacing is great and fast and did not outstay its welcome whatsoever in the 5 or 6 hours taken to complete it. The adventure game and turn based combat portions work fine and I found the general artstyle and GUI to be excellent, particularly the Isometric sections look gorgeous to my eyes.
The interaction between the two halves comes from the fact that whilst you cannot take anything out of the book for long, you can take anything inside, leading to amusing exchanges asking to borrow your neighbours' pickaxe or sledgehammer etc.
Its not a particularly tough game, in fact I was hoping for slightly meatier puzzles but it was fine, the game employs a semi-optional crafting system which shakes up the usual point and click inventory puzzles by including multiple solutions and a slight resource management element which also rewards diligent exploration of the relatively short levels.
Funny, this exact resource inventory puzzle idea I once saw proposed by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame in a podcast I used to listen to back when I was an insufferable teenager, I wonder if thats where the devs got it from?
Overall, Im not mad at Bookwalker, just disappointed. I have since learned this is a gamepass game and I would certainly recommend it if you are subscriber to this service, otherwise I am not too sure but perhaps you will find it more compelling than I did.
If you played the demo like I did you might have been excited at the promise it showed. Half first person adventure in the house of a writer who is serving 30 years for an initally unknown crime, half isometric adventure game "atoning" for said crime by entering novels to extract certain artifacts ; hence the title : The Bookwalker.
In this fictional setting original works are no longer produced, the ability to enter worlds and manipulate them (as well as the scheme we are involved in removing elements from certain books to be transplanted into others for the benefit of subpar writers) has led to all new works being highly derivative of each other. And whilst I wouldnt say this is where the game's cleverness ends, it certainly is where it peaks.
I think the biggest missed opportunity is the fact that the novels we enter into are all entirely fictional. Obviously they are fictional since they are novels but what I mean is that they are made up by the writer of the game, they are not real. Its perhaps understandeable that making the novels fictional offers greater lattitude in setting up the various puzzles which the writer can choose entirely but I just cant help but think what a much better game it would be if we were entering the altered versions of classic works! Surely that would also greatly enhance the point of creativity being dead and new works being derivative. There would be a lot of mileage in exploring these works from new angles and clever puzzles somewhat based on an understanding of the original works.
Perhaps copyright law is to blame, there arent all that many novels in the public domain written after 1910 or so but even with older works I still feel it would have made an overall more solid experience.
The in-universe novels arent devoid of cleverness - there are themes of greed, the point of fiction, theres a climate change analogy in one of them and the last chapter I found particularly compelling in its setting but I think the game's second biggest misstep is that for a game about literature its characters are not very compelling nor does it have all that much to say beyond the surface level. The two main characters are not likeable or even very interesting and all the characters in the novels suffer from being 1. only shown in their specific chapters so there's not much time to flesh them out and 2. They are supposed to be 1 dimensional literally in-universe because the books you are stealing from were written by hack writers! Which is the lamest goddamned excuse I have seen to make the somewhat unrealistic function-as-personality that NPCs often have in videogames seem clever. There is also a running storyline through the game that touches up to danganronpa V3 in terms of its themes but without wishing to spoil, its resolution felt very unearned to me.
I have spent a lot of time railing on this game but in all honesty I didnt hate it. Its insubstantiality is also its greatest ally as the pacing is great and fast and did not outstay its welcome whatsoever in the 5 or 6 hours taken to complete it. The adventure game and turn based combat portions work fine and I found the general artstyle and GUI to be excellent, particularly the Isometric sections look gorgeous to my eyes.
The interaction between the two halves comes from the fact that whilst you cannot take anything out of the book for long, you can take anything inside, leading to amusing exchanges asking to borrow your neighbours' pickaxe or sledgehammer etc.
Its not a particularly tough game, in fact I was hoping for slightly meatier puzzles but it was fine, the game employs a semi-optional crafting system which shakes up the usual point and click inventory puzzles by including multiple solutions and a slight resource management element which also rewards diligent exploration of the relatively short levels.
Funny, this exact resource inventory puzzle idea I once saw proposed by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame in a podcast I used to listen to back when I was an insufferable teenager, I wonder if thats where the devs got it from?
Overall, Im not mad at Bookwalker, just disappointed. I have since learned this is a gamepass game and I would certainly recommend it if you are subscriber to this service, otherwise I am not too sure but perhaps you will find it more compelling than I did.
01156
11 months ago