Developed by Do My Best studios and published by tinyBUILD, The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales is a narrative adventure (with heavy emphasis on ‘narrative’), blending top-down turn-based gameplay with exploration and familiar tales, playing with the tantalising premise of diving head first into a novel and interacting with an author’s creation.
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales is on the bookshelves of PlayStation, Xbox and Steam from £11.99 ($14.99) and is available with Xbox Game Pass.
Story – An Anthology
We join disgraced author Etienne Quist in a world where Writers are strictly policed by the law and its enforcers. For reasons yet to be revealed, Etienne is serving a 30 year ban on his penmanship. Being as broke as one can expect an out-of-work writer to be and refusing to come to terms with his shambles of a life, he gets in touch with a sketchy agency. They agree to free him of his shackles – in return for the theft of 6 items. By breaking and entering through the paper barrier separating reality from fiction, Etienne must lose himself in imaginary worlds to retrieve the requested objects.
Each chapter is represented through a book, all with their own genre, setting and plots, varying in depth and length. As you wander from one fictitious land to the next, you discover nods to all types of literature, from worlds with their roots tangled with the Yggdrasil roots of Norse mythology, to the ‘stuck between a rock and a hard place’ narrative of Excalibur. Etienne’s story plays out between the lines of these novels, his past and book-faced police chasing him through the pages.
The missions are delivered to your house, giving a new meaning to the word ‘bookcase’.
Gameplay – Story Driven
You see the real world through the first person perspective of Etienne, looking around his bare-bones apartment. After being transported to fantasy realms, you switch to birds-eye view. The interaction prompts stay the same in both worlds, using X near an item or character to trigger dialogue options. Although you are offered choices and told that your decisions will reshape the story, this appears to be more of an illusion, often finding myself left with the dialogue option I was supposed to choose.
You are able to teleport between reality and words at any moment, often prompted when this is needed to aid in progressing the main story. Keeping to the paperback theme, puzzle solving is also completed through selecting text options. These vary depending on what items you have in your inventory, or how much ‘ink’ you have available. Ink works as your mana in The Book Walker, being used to rewrite the paragraph you are in as well as being the source of your power in battle.
While confrontation can be avoided, I didn’t realise this and so can tell you combat plays out in simple turn-based actions. Etienne has a handful of attacks, including drain or shield, which can be upgraded once per chapter. These fights become a little repetitive and undemanding, the only change being an increased enemy health bar, erasing the impeding sense of failure truly experienced by a writer.
Combat takes place through simple turn-based actions.
Audio and Graphics – Snap Back to Reality
When in the top-down perspective of the fictional world, the camera is zoomed out. While this does create the immersive feeling of peering down into a novel, it makes it difficult to appreciate the amount of detail crammed into these bite sized slices of fiction. All of the genres have their own aesthetic, whether it be dusty deserts or the metallic robot factory. A particularly effective audio choice was the mystical soundtrack turning to silence when you return to a monochromatic and dull reality.
-
- Each books hides it own mysterious object for you to find.
-
- Your combat skills can be upgraded once per chapter.
-
- The novels explore multiple genres.
-
- All the characters and worlds have different levels of depth.
The Booker Walker: Thief of Tales was reviewed on PS5 with a key provided by Stride PR.
