The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales is an adventure game developed by Do My Best.
You play as a once-acclaimed writer who, after being convicted of a crime, received a sentence that doesn’t allow him to write anymore. When a friend connects him with a person who is willing to hire him to physically dive into books and steal the items within them in exchange for removing the shackles that keep him from writing, he reluctantly accepts.
Each of the six levels has you diving into a different book of varying genres to search for and retrieve a specific item. While they all have distinct visual styles, you approach each level the same.
While the idea of jumping into different works of fiction, manipulating them, and stealing items to take back into the real world is fascinating, the game never delivers on the great concept. Characters are overly chatty but don’t always dispense useful or engaging information. Choices are almost always pointless. When selecting dialog, it’s clear by the answers that one response is the correct one because the conversation will always move back to one of the specific lines of dialog regardless of your choices. It diminishes the impact of choices and makes the other options feel like padding. Gameplay outside of choices also feels lacking. For example, an incredible concept is that as a writer, you can use ink to alter parts of the story to suit you, such as unlocking a door. However, this usually amounts to nothing more than another option on a list. Another place where the story fails is not showing what happens when someone takes items—and people—from fictional worlds and brings them into the real world. There are no ramifications or closure to stealing items like a weather control device or Mjolnir.
Combat is basic. Limited moves leave little room for strategy, but the unremarkable enemy AI means beating them involves managing your resources like ink that power your attacks and health. Looking for key items will get you enough healing items and materials to craft bottles of ink, so I was never in danger of not having enough resources.
A few issues agitated me throughout my playthrough. There’s no indication of what can be interacted with, so to be thorough, you have to walk close to every wall and around every side of every object to know if it’s interactable. The character will often turn away from objects when he collides with them, so multiple times when I walked up to an item to click on it, he’d turn away, and I’d lose the option. You can’t spin in place, so I’d have to walk away, turn around, and try again, often repeating the action multiple times before I could interact with the environment. I found a game-breaking bug where after doing everything needed for a quest, the character who was supposed to advance the story didn’t. It led to me contacting the developers, confirming the issues, and having them give me a line of code in the save file to edit to progress. This issue is likely fixed by now.
No matter how good the concept is, I found The Book Walker to be unremarkable. The okay story, gameplay, and combat made it serviceable but underwhelming. While not bad, it’s not good enough to strongly recommend to anyone other than folks who love stories where the concept is bigger than the content or folks who love adventure games and just want a new one.
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales is available now for $14.99 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S.
Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales.
