Maybe it’s corny. Maybe it’s trite. I don’t care. I love, and will continue to love, media about the process of creating media. Books about books, films about films, games about games and the act of creating them. Bookwalker was always going to hit me in a happy place, is what I’m saying.

book good

The Bookwalker is an adventure game set in an alternate reality where writers are beholden to the writing police and have the ability to physically move through books. When our protagonist, Etienne, faces thirty years of service to a slop publisher, he turns to this ability to walk through books as a way out. If he steals enough artefacts from these books, a mysterious benefactor has promised to set him free.

I will be blunt - the overarching plot is not this game’s strength. While it should work - what’s not to love about an adventure story about freedom, mystery, and a long series of heists? - in practice, it’s thinly developed and contradictory, with threads brought up, then dropped, ideas never fleshed out, and just a general sense that it is not and was never meant to be The Point.

Similarly, Etienne’s character development feels haphazard, with the lesson he’s meant to learn, while clear, never really seeming to mesh well with the broader plot, and at times, contradicting everything we already know about Etienne. Etienne’s companion, Roderick, repeatedly extols the virtues of caring about the characters in the books around him, but beyond a throwaway line here and there, there is every reason to believe Etienne does care and is just, when the plot demands it, saying things that sound more uncaring than he actually is. Why Etienne does things and the motivations Roderick ascribes to him are always at odds with one another, creating a frustrating atmosphere as you, the player, try to engage with the game’s contradictory messaging around its own morality.

The solution, I found, was to sigh, flatten out your fingers across the keyboard, and reframe the game in terms of what actually works.

May we all perform care as well as you, blessed robot.

The Bookwalker is an adventure game with point-and-click mechanics. It has an overarching plot, but forget that plot. It doesn’t really matter. It’s supposed to matter, but ultimately isn’t what works, so forget that plot.

Instead, what matters, what will hook you into this game like it hooked me, is the books Etienne walks into and the stories he encounters. It’s within these diorama-esque settings that the game truly shines.

No, I did enjoy the game, I promise. It's just...look, some things work better than others, y'know?

Over the course of the game, Etienne travels into seven different books, hunting down artefacts and exploring the plots and settings of each of these books. It’s here that the game really comes into its own, not necessarily because of the gameplay or narrative, but because of the narratives and settings of these stories themselves.

Ranging from a frozen-over revolution to a spaceship cruising the void, the settings Etienne explores searching for artefacts are exquisite. There is palpable love in how these settings are designed and the various characters that inhabit them. Throughout, I found myself less interested in Etienne’s personal story, and more in the stories he was exploring. I wanted to read the book about the joy storms. I wanted to learn more about the magic symbols etched in the sky. I wanted robot Asgard and the revolution springing up within it.

This is perhaps the game’s greatest strength and greatest weakness all rolled into one. The sheer variety and creativity of the various settings show how much affection went into this game. However, in so doing, they also highlight how much the main story is actually lacking. This isn’t a game where I keep going because I want to know what happens to Etienne or Roderick. This is a game where I keep going because I want to know more about the narratives happening in the background and the worlds that are meant to be a window dressing for the bigger plot.

Etienne may be learning to care about characters as people, but I already do, and it’s those people, not Etienne, that I want to spend time with.

Ah, yes, thank you, Autism Bot 3000

This is the paradox of Bookwalker. Its best elements are in its beautiful book settings; however, as the game progresses, while the backdrop remains detailed and beautiful, the ability to move through the spaces becomes less and less complex. There are fewer choices for the player to make, and less opportunity to explore, supplanted instead by linear designs. As the game progresses the opportunity to enjoy it becomes less and less.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it, though. There’s a lot to love about Bookwalker, even if that love is clouded by the knowledge that this could have been so much more. There are other worlds than these, and the glimpse we get of them is tantalising.

Developer: Do My Best
Genre: Adventure
Year: 2023
Country: Russia
Language: English
Time to complete: 5-7 hours