I really enjoyed the concept of the game, with just enough lore to get me engaged with the plot but open enough for my imagination to take off.

Controls were very jarring on console, not enough to ruin the experience but I would warn someone about it before starting.

I wanted more lore and story from a 6 hour little 2.5D game which I think is a great compliment.

Really really love the central conceit of entering books - it means each chapter can have a very different environment and a little bit of a tonal shakeup. The game does very well when it's sketching in some evocative worldbuilding of each of the seven worlds here.

Everything else is a bit meh - the adventure game is weak (no puzzles, etc), the character writing a little limp, the overarching narrative muddy and uninteresting. I enjoyed returning to the outside world in first person but there wasn't anything done with it really. Controls and text are occasionally buggy, and the combat is both unnecessary and a little unresponsive at times. I especially didn't like how the game failed to react to player choice - sometimes chastising the protagonist for choices I seemed not to have made. I'm fine with a narrative railroading me into being a bad person, but don't give me a good and a bad option and then act like I picked the bad option no matter what. Thankfully, there wasn't much of this and the game is short enough that just a brief dip into a few cool little worlds is still satisfying.

a mixed bag. the 3d segments feel straight out of a $3.49 steam game called pizzeria simulator or something (which is especially jarring juxtaposed with more polished 2d segments), the narrative seems wholly uninterested in engaging with its own most interesting elements (oh yeah i fell in love with a character in the book i was writing and risked both of our lives to pull her into the real world so we could be together but then we broke up bye), and the whole thing is never quite able to escape its own russianocity.

Interesting premise of actually going into the world of the books to steal their McGuffins. Things I really didn't like:
- This game really didn't need combat, could of just had more interesting puzzles like other top down adventure games.
-Really thought we would of done more in the first person part instead of fetching tools. Wonder why a crouch button was assigned to the first person mode too?
-Last act felt like it zoomed by real quick (Running from the police at the end was goofy ass fuck.).
-Surprised Amanda wasn't just shoved back into our boy's book. Just saying, the police immediately showed up when you pulled the head honcho of the ring from one book to another.
Overall a nice attempt of a game by this dev, hopefully their next project improves from what they learned from this game.

I dove into Bookwalker: Thief of Tales without a clue, driven by two reasons: 1) it's about to vanish from Game Pass, and 2) the logo and splash art promised a cyberpunk adventure. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t cyberpunk or flashy. At all. But hey, that’s part of the fun, right?

From the get-go, the game intrigued me with its unique premise and world-building. Stepping into the shoes of a literary thief, I found myself navigating through different book worlds, each with its own charm and challenges. The narrative kept me interested (though it was a minimal affair, for the most part), even when the gameplay got a bit clunky.

Ah, the gameplay. If you love point-and-click adventures, you'll find this a quirky delight. However, some mechanics felt like they needed a bit more polish. There were moments of frustration, but also a lot of satisfaction once you got the hang of things. The character often paths in weird ways, especially when clicking on objects from the wrong side.

Turn based combat is also a thing. Yeah, not much to say about that...

Clocking in at a solid 7 hours, Bookwalker offers an engaging experience that’s worth your time. Judging by the low percentages of achievement winners (only 26% have even completed the first chapter!), it seems like many players started this game for the same reasons I did but didn’t stick around. Their loss!

It may not have been the cyberpunk escapade I expected, but it delivered a unique and enjoyable journey. If you’re looking for a game that’s a bit off the beaten path, give it a shot before it leaves Game Pass. You might just find yourself hooked on its charm.

This one’s got a phenomenal premise: a writer goes flat broke and is tasked by his debtor with using a magical device to steal – literally, as well as figuratively, I suppose – certain artifacts from other writers’ more famous novels. How deeply the stories the writer visits are altered by the theft is left up to the player.

There’s some really neat divergence in visual styles here, with the real world taking place entirely in a realistic-looking apartment building controlled using a first person camera, while the actual metaphysical book exploration adopts a kind of tactical isometric perspective. This was the first point at which the game lost me: the tactical combat. Turn-based combat mechanics are towards the bottom of the ‘how would I, the player, like to explore literary dioramas in a video game?’ list.

The second point that yanked me out of The Book Walker was the many, many bugs I encountered while playing. I read somewhere that The Book Walker eventually got patched, but I wasn’t able to make it too deeply into the game when it came out due to the sheer number of progress-halting bugs. The main character is sluggish in the first place, and some of the wilder bugs slow the framerate to unplayable single digits. I once loaded into two overlapping versions of the apartment complex level, with every object in the environment jutting out from the other instance of that object. There’s definitely something here, but this one needed to cook longer, I think.

A good visual novel with RPG elements, something like a very simplified Disco Elysium. The only disadvantage is that in this game there is no possibility to stop the dialog. If you have already chosen some line or action, you have to read the dialog to the end, or finish what you started. This is very strange. And the epilogue is kind of weird. In the penultimate book, there is a release of information that was supposed to be revealed further on somehow... But it doesn't.
Anyway, I enjoyed the process of going through this game. Its gameplay is something new that I have never seen before.

Indescritível, é lindo, maravilhoso, que delicia de jogo.

Cada mundo que você entra dá gosto de explorar, procurar os itens, entender as histórias, conversar com os personagens, são todos muito interessantes. A escrita dos personagens é incrível eles são tão vividos! O protagonista conversando com o parceiro dele, em vários momentos senti como se fosse uma conversa minha real com um amigo, tem tantas falas criativas e legais, toda hora tirava print de alguma.

O senso de humor é bem colocado e muito natural. A trilha sonora é bem sensorial, com uma sonoplastia interessante.

Só uns pequenos detalhes, poderiam ter polido mais em alguns momentos, não tive nenhum bug grave, mas deu para notar algumas falhas ou inconsistências, tipo em uma transição de cenário, a tela foi e voltou, aí tive que voltar no cenário anterior e avançar de novo, e em uma parte é dito que o personagem X saiu do local Z e estava em Y, assim o jogo esperava que eu fosse para Y naquele momento, mas fui para Z e o personagem estava lá.

E todo o debate sobre personagens e pessoas, eu comecei de uma forma mais bruta e agora no final estou quase chorando. Se o protagonista é uma pessoa e ao mesmo tempo um personagem, então os outros personagens são tão pessoas quanto ele, ainda mais nesse mundo onde existe uma interação entre mundo real e literário, aí durante isso pensei sobre minha waifu, ela não é só um personagem, eu amo ela, ninguém pode matar o que ela é para mim, assim como o Roderick é importante para o Etienne, eles estão vivos junto com nós, são parte de nós, recebem nosso afeto, nos dão apoio em momentos de tristeza. Todos os personagens são feitos com a alma e o sangue de seus criadores, representam seus sonhos, seus medos e muito mais.

E ver toda essa emoção da importância das histórias materializada no jogo foi maravilhoso, histórias e seus personagens nos motivam a alcançar o inalcançável, nos inspiram a ser alguém melhor, nos colocam junto com eles para vivenciar todas histórias já criadas ao longo da eternidade.

Espero que meu amor pelas minhas waifus seja tão sincero e poderoso como o de Etienne que se apaixonou por sua própria personagem Amanda.
Espero continuar lendo e vivenciando histórias com personagens tão vivos quantos os criados por Etienne para sempre.