A common phrase you’ll hear when talking to someone about a movie or TV adaptation is “the book is better.” Books transport people into worlds with just words and the person’s ability to imagine based on what the author writes. And while the book is the same for everyone, their experience and history will determine exactly how things look and sound, which will be different for everyone. But what if you could jump into that book’s world and interact with it?

The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales puts you in the shoes of a writer in trouble with the law. He’s done some sort of crime that’s netted him 30 years of punishment. Instead of going through with it, he’s resorted to stealing items from book worlds in the hopes of having his shackles removed by an illegal third party.

The game has two portions to it, which is a bit strange. You start the game in first person, although it’s very basic. There’s so little to this part that the game doesn’t even offer an invert axis option. This is the real world, and how you’ll interact with things like your phone, or puzzle solutions that aren’t available in the books. You’ll have a case delivered with a book, some notes, and a separate container for the item you will steal. Strangely, the notes really only worked on the first story; every mission that followed only let me view the item details. The second portion is when you dive into a story and it becomes akin to a point and click adventure game. I’m interested to know if it actually plays like one on PC, because it doesn’t on console, and that is one of the main problems with it.

You’ll navigate several books that each have puzzles to decipher to move on. There are occasional fights, some that are optional, while others are mandatory. You have a few skills which can be upgraded between books, although I only did it the first time when it introduced the mechanic. I was on book six before remembering I could do it, so I was making things more difficult than they needed to be. Of course, the game doesn’t punish you for dying – you regain all your health and ink, and start back right where you left off. There’s no reason not to choose dialogue options that involve loosing life or ink, as the meters may as well not exist. Ink will be used as stamina in battles, as well as for affecting the book world.

While each book has unique items to find for progressing, the puzzles are all relatively the same. Find a key or power source, build a tool, craft an item, then interact with the world as necessary. The choices in the game don’t really differentiate the experience outside of trophies, optional battles, and minor changes in dialogue. I appreciate the nature it attempted, as it almost made the books a choose your own adventure, but it’s result is too linear.

The game experience suffers heavily from its UI on console. This includes broken sequences that require soft boots to keep playing, dialogue sequences triggering before they are supposed to, and the main character stopping randomly and being uncontrollable for several seconds at a time when in the books. Moving objects is not intuitive and seems to be random at best. The levers are the only things that worked about 80% of the time. Interactions will provide the solution by having the option greyed out, which works as a type of hint, but sometimes those interactions will just disappear and not come back for you to use your newly crafted/obtained tool.

There’s a quality of life feature I’ve seen for point and click games on console that includes an option to highlight hotspots, as well as being able to cycle through them. This game would benefit greatly from either of those, cycling especially with missing things and moving objects. There was one key hotspot in book three that I needed to interact with to progress, but it wouldn’t acknowledge the button press, so I spent 30 minutes going around everywhere before finally getting it to work. Probably one of the more frustrating things is seeing a tool you need to craft laying about as an asset, but as it’s background art, you can’t interact with. For a game about the written word, there are quite a few errors throughout that gave me pause. Some dialogue doesn’t make sense at all with how it’s written.

I went into The Bookwalker not understanding what the game actually was. The trailer and even the game descriptions didn’t adequately prepare me for what I was getting into. There are a lot of cool ideas in this, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. I think it’s worth checking out if it’s available to play on a service such as Gamepass when you read this, but I see a lot of people dropping off before the first book is complete, which is a shame, because the epilogue made me smile.

5 out of 10

Pros

• Cool Concepts
• Epilogue

Cons

• Navigation and UI for Console
• Improper/Poor English in Parts of Dialogue

The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales was developed by DO MY BEST and published by tinyBuild. It is available on PC, PS4, PS5, X1, and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on PS5. If you’d like to see more of The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales, check out the official site.

 

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