The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales

We all know what it's like to get lost in a good book, but developer Do My Best is taking this concept to the next level with its adventure game, The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales. Essentially, in this title, you play as a writer-turned-thief, who has the supernatural and peculiar ability to be able to dive into books and become a part of the world they lay out. Why? Long story short, protagonist Etienne Quist is in some trouble with some bad people, and to work off a debt, he is tasked with completing six missions, each requiring Quist to acquire a fictional item from a book, to be able to save his skin from a miserable fate. This takes Quist to fantasy worlds, sci-fi realms, the Wild West, and more, and each time you have to solve a series of puzzles and problems to locate the desired item.

A large part of The Bookwalker revolves around exploring the surrounding world and levels, communicating with NPCs, picking up items, and interacting with the world to discover secrets and goodies. This part of the game really sets the scene for interesting narrative threads and compelling characters, and weaves in some more overarching morality themes that makes you question the nature of your role as a real person permanently altering and changing the course of already written and published stories by pulling parts of them out into the real world. As The Bookwalker isn't a title bolstered with side quests and additional narrative avenues, each tale feels very complete and detailed, and you do get lost in the short worlds that are set out in each of the unique books that land on Quist's doorstep.

But the stories and narrative are not the only compelling part of The Bookwalker. The puzzles that are set out in front of you and how they can be tackled are some of the most entertaining parts of the game. Sometimes a puzzle will, for example, require scavenging the local environment for a battery necessary for opening a door, but others will require Quist to literally exit the book and find an item from the real world (i.e. a shovel) to help him progress. The fact that The Bookwalker plays on two planes of reality allows it to get really creative, even if the solution to most of the puzzles are fairly straightforward and lacking in complexity.

That being said, while it does lack challenge a lot of the time, there are important decisions to be made, and these will affect further parts of the gameplay experience. You could, as another example, attempt to open a door with a lockpick to skip past the tasks of actually finding the key or creating a sturdier tool such as a crowbar to pry the door open. However, if that lockpick breaks, you have no easy way to replace it, and that might close some doors for Etienne in the future, as he may be unable to use a lockpick to open a chest that can't be pried open by a crowbar. These little decisions stack up and add a lot to The Bookwalker as an experience.

I will say though the combat isn't particularly great, but at the same time, it's not a very large part of the game either. Occasionally, Etienne will be drawn into a combat sequence, which uses very rudimentary turn-based strategy as its foundation. You use attacks and moves that inflict specific amounts of damage or cause status effects, and have to defeat a collection of foes while managing Etienne's health bar and his ink bar - which is very similar to a mana or energy bar used in other tactical-strategy games. Essentially, to attack, Etienne must consume ink, but he only has a limited amount of ink, and therefore must also use syphon attacks to regain some ink before making a next major attack. This all sounds like there's a fair degree of complexity involved with the combat proceedings, but in reality, you can just stun all the enemies, syphon one, stun them again, syphon, and repeat with only rare occasions where you need to use a healing item to top Etienne off. As I say, thankfully, this isn't a very prominent part of the gameplay.

While the combat isn't great, the main problem with The Bookwalker is the number of performance issues that break the immersion and frustrate the player. Between fighting the cursor to direct exactly where you want Etienne to go, to interactable items and objects not working, to bugs that force you to reboot the game, there are tons of minor issues that consistently stack up, and from my experience, these get exponentially worse if you attempt to play on PC with a controller. Mouse and keyboard have their demons, but controller input is the inner sanctum of irritating performance hell.

But even though it isn't flawless in any sense, the concept is unique enough and the gameplay engaging enough for the most part that I found The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales to be a really interesting indie title. With more polish, this could be something really special, and I hope Do My Best is thinking about potentially continuing the series because it feels as if they have something special here. Either way, with The Bookwalker available right now on Game Pass, I'd definitely recommend spending a few hours with this game, especially during this steadier July we're currently in.