We've all read a good book and wished we could just dive into it. To walk amidst its characters and soak in the vibes of its world. You could even say that desire to embed myself in some of my favorite books is what drove my love for gaming. Video games offered up the kinds of narratives I loved in books but allowed me to have that level of interaction with the world that elevated the experiences to another place.
The crew at DO MY BEST can certainly relate as their latest release, The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales, has you literally diving into books to pull off heists of iconic literary objects while working off the sentence handed down by the Writer Police. It's so cool.
Just the Facts |
Developer: DO MY BEST |
Publisher: tinyBuild |
Platform(s): PC*, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series S and X |
Price: $14.99 or free for Xbox Game Pass subscribers |
Release Date: June 22, 2023 |
Review key provided by Stride PR. |
DO MY BEST's small four-person team brings us this narrative CRPG-like literary adventure out of Russia, following up their incredibly successful debut release, The Final Station, with something that's been nearly six years in the making. If there's any connective tissue between this isometric adventure game and their pixel art survival horror debut, it's a dedication to engaging narrative where you might not expect it. A commitment to telling stories that are truly only possible in video games. And The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales, despite its literary roots, is exactly that.
From the jump, Bookwalker sets itself up in a series of fascinating worlds. The first layer of the literary onion is the game's core reality — one where its protagonist, a punished writer named Etienne Quist, is sentenced to 30 years bound in shackles for some literary crime the player will learn about as the game unfolds. These shackles enforce a literal, physical writer's block, keeping Etienne from being able to write freely, and after a shady benefactor promises the ability to eventually remove these shackles, Etienne finds himself recruited into a series of book heists. Six books, six items to steal, and Etienne has his freedom again.
In this world, many writers don't really write with pure original thought. They use their abilities as "Bookwalkers" to dive into a book's world. They pull things from reality in and things from the books out to remix classic tales in their other books. This game clearly has a lot to say about the reboot/remake culture in today's media landscape and the general lack of originality in many creative fields. But weirdly, in turn, it all stands to highlight how interesting of a world Bookwalker is set in and even how fun their takes on classic tales are in the books Etienne is pulling heists in.
For example, early on you dive into a book retelling classic Nordic lore. In this book, Thor is an industrialist who runs a major electric company, one that fears acquisition from the corporate snakes over at Jormungandr Group. He has built a series of adorably stout robots, named after Thor's children, whose general innocence makes it all the more difficult when Etienne has to pull their batteries out to make his way through Thor's factory.
Every book you'll dive into has some interesting take on a classic tale and a fascinating series of characters to contend with just like this one. It's anchored by charming writing and a constant tongue-in-cheek satirizing of poor writing and cliched concepts. There are some translation issues and the story takes a bit longer than expected to really get rolling, but it's a worthy adventure to embark on, especially with its breezy 6-8 hour runtime.
At its core, though, is just a story about an artist rediscovering himself, rediscovering why it is he does what he does — exemplified by the relationship he shares with your journey's companion, Roderick.
Roderick is a caged character from some other book that Etienne stumbles onto early on, one who has been passed around between Bookwalkers for a while now thanks to his ability to read ahead in the text to give the walkers an upper hand while they work their way through these books. The relationship that builds between these two is the heart of this experience, and one that surprised me with its depth and resonance once I hit credits.
Anybody who has felt a deeper connection with any sort of text — anybody who felt driven to write fanfiction or join roleplay groups for worlds they've fallen in love with — they'll find a surprising emotional resonance with this story.
...A story about an artist rediscovering himself, rediscovering why it is he does what he does.
With such a story-driven experience, and one focused on the literal and metaphorical reading of texts, DO MY BEST has made Bookwalker an experience that toes the line between a traditional point-and-click adventure and a narrative CRPG (a la Disco Elysium, something that feels like a clear inspiration all throughout). You'll bounce back and forth from a first-person perspective in Etienne's actual reality and the traditional CRPG isometric perspective once you dive into books. With that in mind, most of the experience is about puzzling. Tip-toeing through each book's world to bypass its built-in twists and turns, choosing whether to assist or disregard the book's characters as you go, all in favor of ultimately stealing a key piece of the narrative on your way out. It's more consequential than you think. Stealing these things changes the book forever, so the impact of your choices weighs heavy.
Solving puzzles is a little more straightforward than I expected though. When I first heard the concept, selling the idea of pulling things from reality into the books you inhabit to help your path through, I imagined a flexible experience where you'd have some variety in how you approach situations. But Bookwalker's puzzles and conflicts more often than not have one clear solution. How you get to that solution — whether you take a detour for some more resources or use one specific tool over another to get there — allows for some experimentation, but it's an otherwise tunneled experience. So many times, I felt like I might be able to try something different but faced pushback, only to just go with what the game wanted me to do. It was a bit disappointing, so much so that it dictated the type of character Etienne would be at times.
It all works fine and the story is enjoyable enough that these issues never made Bookwalker a slog to get through. It just left me wondering what a game like this could look like with more time, money, and resources put behind it. It could be that this is exactly what DO MY BEST hoped to make when they set out, and with that in mind, what's here is great and serves the very specific story they were trying to tell beautifully. But I still think it could have been something truly special with a little more freedom in choice.
Across the whole experience though, there is one thing that did feel like a chore whenever it came up, and that's the lightly shoehorned-in combat system. You might be surprised to even hear the idea of combat broached in the kind of game I've described so far, but sure enough, it's here. So let's talk about it.
As Etienne navigates through these books, combat inevitably erupts, either through the interference of spooky book monsters called Ink Eaters or from the understandably confused characters of the books who suddenly find themselves bothered by a book-headed weirdo. Bookwalker's combat is delivered via a fairly simple and traditional turn-based system. Etienne can use his "ink" (a system that he can use out of combat as well to bend things to his will, something that isn't used nearly enough) to pull off special abilities like stunning all enemies or putting up a shield to absorb incoming damage.
It's fine. It works. And by the end, when I had a full suite of abilities on my hands, it had grown on me. But it felt like a needless addition to an experience that could have survived without compulsory combat. It was the least enjoyable part of the experience that hurt on several levels. It added a ton of stress around managing my health and ink levels, discouraging me to experiment with risking either resource out of combat. It was oddly stiff and boring, with a strange amount of thinking time for the AI causing a strange pace, despite your enemy's next moves being chosen far ahead of time. And the only reason it gets interesting in the end is that you get so powerful that it becomes a fun puzzle to figure out how to blast through enemies in as few turns as possible.
I personally would have much preferred randomized, dice roll-y outcomes to combat situations in the narrative or just having more options in avoiding combat altogether. It feels like the kind of thing that "adds value" to the experience for people who don't love pure narrative-driven games while hurting the narrative in the process.
It's just one of a few systems the game employs to add more "game-y" mechanics. There's crafting and resource gathering for example. But it is certainly the most egregious and least engaging of the batch.
But a game can do much worse than having a few unnecessary systems bogging it down. Not judging a book by its cover and all that, Bookwalker is so much more than a few annoying combat sequences, and its story still sings.
Speaking of a book's cover, the team's artists do some incredible work here to craft Bookwalker's impressive style. From Etienne's fascinating-looking Bookwalker form, with a fantastic stylish cloak and genuinely clever book-like face, to the beautiful isometric environmental design of each new book, communicating the tone of their worlds with a glance, this game's visual language is one I vibed with from the start.
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales is a complicated read. It's got a fascinating story set in a series of engaging worlds, but actually interacting with it all is a little simpler than imagined. Its story focus is regularly undermined by unnecessary combat sequences that are functionally fine but a drag on the game's pace. But on the other hand, the story's surprising emotional resonance and relationship-driven experience are worth seeing through to the end.
Like some of your favorite books from your youth, The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales has some nagging parts that hold it back from wholehearted recommendation, but the effect it had on me is strong enough that I'll fight for it anyway.
DO MY BEST did their best — and came out the other end with a special kind of narrative experience that I think most people will find a lot to love in.
Video Games Are Good and The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales is . . . GOOD. (7.5/10)
+ fascinating worldbuilding with an intriguing literary world at its core, fun tongue-in-cheek writing, beautiful isometric art style, and a surprisingly emotional story
- lacking puzzles and narrative choices make the actual interaction with the environment feel empty at times, tacked-on combat system you're forced to engage with bogs things down
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Thank you so much for your review Nate, from our perspective the combat system was implemented to create tension spikes, because we’ve noticed that the overall flow of the game was pretty flat. The best way to solve that will be through existing systems, like story/dialogues, but I was not confident enough in my writing to try that. In the end I totally agree with you that combat feels kinda out of place, because it is in a way, but I hope that at least it helped players to be a bit more engaged by providing some tension, even by the cost of them saying “why is it even in here?!” while experiencing it.