Highlights

For a game with a brilliant setting, inventive art style and dystopian tones, The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales has managed to fly under the radar since its release in June this year. It’s a surreal point-and-click adventure mixed with a dash of RPG elements that launched alongside titanic sequels like Final Fantasy 16 and Diablo 4, and deserves a bit more attention than it got.

Set in a bleak world where writing is a commodity controlled by an authoritarian government, The Bookwalker puts you in the shoes of former writer Etienne Quist, sentenced to 30 years of writer’s block for an unnamed crime. Writers do not survive the harsh labour that comes with the punishment, so in his desperation to regain creative freedom, Etienne agrees to steal several legendary artefacts from various novels for a mysterious client.

In each chapter, Etienne is given a briefcase with the novel at hand, the artefact he is tasked to heist and a place to put the artefact in. Here, you can explore his apartment in first-person, finding letters, newspapers and interactive objects that tell you more about The Bookwalker’s setting. They’re completely optional, but give a lot more depth to the environment.

Entering the novel kicks off the game’s main loop, where you now control Etienne in top-down third-person. Like most point-and-click games, movement and interaction is now done through clicking and interacting with objects will reveal items or new areas to explore. Progressing the story is done through solving the current problem, like opening a locked door or fixing a broken vehicle.

Some puzzles require you to “wake up” from the novels and grab items from Etienne’s apartment complex, which provides the “sense of travelling” in a game about diving into novels. Since the option is always available, not just during certain story beats, it gives the sense that I can exit the novels at any moment and look around my surroundings. It’s strangely empowering, with the only cost being a small space on screen that is usually left empty anyway.

While exploring, Etienne comes across his main companion, an unnamed character inside a metal cage that prevents him from merging into the stories. This companion is soon dubbed as Roderick, and helps to keep track of various objectives, providing nifty hints if you’re ever stuck and as a moral compass for Etienne’s (and your) actions.

As for the RPG elements I mentioned earlier, Etienne may find himself in situations he has to fight his way out of. Combat here is turn-based, using Ink as a resource to fend off multiple enemies at once. There’s not much depth to combat, but it manages to create short moments of tension in the middle of puzzle solving. 

Over the course of the game, Etienne is given tough moral choices to navigate, and there are plenty of opportunities to meet with the inhabitants of every novel. Roderick, as your moral compass, acts as a compassionate foil to Etienne’s harsh desperation, but is also powerless to stop you should you choose not to listen. It’s a great dynamic that adds more depth while keeping the player agency.

There’s a dreadful gloom to The Bookwalker’s visuals, filled in a distinctly muted colour scheme that pairs really well with the environmental themes. Nothing is overtly bright in the “real world”, highlighting that dystopian feeling, but neither are any of the settings in each novel, a place where most people escape to from the real world. 

The slow, ambient calm from its soundtrack also adds to that gloom, emphasizing Etienne’s hopelessness in the beginning. The developer duo from DO MY BEST managed to nail environmental storytelling on its head, combining elements of sight and sound to create a realistic fantasy world.
With a playtime of 7-8 hours and price tag of US$11.99, The Bookwalker, Thief of Tales was a narrative adventure with an original premise that was engaging throughout its runtime. It’s a game that I would highly recommend most people try, since it can be finished over a weekend and rewards you with a story full of mystery and commentary on creativity in today’s society.

Food is a huge part of any culture, crafted from cooking with whatever was available, with years of recipes passed down through generations. These dishes can become a crucial part of a person’s cultural identity, a topic that Venba manages to weave into its narrative of a South-Indian immigrant family moving to Canada in the 80’s.

Developers Visai Games managed to use every moment in the game to craft a story that left a strong impression on me. Coupled with the charming art style and a detailed sound design, Venba managed to roll up a heartwarming tale into a bite-sized length of an hour. 

Set in 1988, our protagonist Venba recently moved to Toronto with her husband Pavalaan and was not feeling very well one morning. Having to make lunch for her husband and herself anyways, she brings out her mother’s recipe book, full of homemade South-Asian flavours, and begins to make a pot of steamed idli for lunch. 

Unfortunately, the recipe book was stained, damaged, and entirely torn out during the move, which left parts of each recipe missing or completely unreadable. Now, Venba (and you) have to make sense of what’s left to recreate the dishes through trial and error.

Across the different chapters, I found that most of the cooking puzzles could be solved within one or two attempts without much hassle. Even if you did make a mistake, Venba would make a quick explanation of what went wrong and let you restart, giving you a consequence-free retry and letting you try a different approach. 

These sections never felt distracting to me and kept the narrative flowing with small bits of dialogue from characters with Venba. It felt like a normal conversation someone would have while cooking together while providing hints to the player should they need the extra nudge. With lively Tamil music playing in the background and great sound foleys paired with the cooking, it was a satisfying experience to complete each puzzle from each chapter.

What kept me hooked to the story was Venba’s relationship with Pavalaan, and eventually their son Kavin, and the struggles this family faced during their time in Toronto. A common theme showed the couple struggling to find higher employment and struggling to make ends meet while witnessing Kavin struggling with his cultural identity clashing with trying to fit in with the other kids.

However, the narrative did feel wordy at certain points but this was remedied by the interactive moments of dialogue choices and smartphone tapping, a well-timed break from clicking more than a jarring pause to the story.

I also wanted to give props to the little details developers Abhi and his team scattered throughout the game, adding some context to the situation. For instance, the dialogue bubbles would occasionally be coloured differently to show that the character was speaking in Tamil or English, emphasising Venba’s attempts at keeping the family speaking Tamil. Occasionally, some speech bubbles would be obscured, hinting that the reader wasn’t able to understand that particular sentence so well. It seems minor, but it helped connect better with the characters’ struggles of learning a new language.

It’s these little details, along with the overall game, that I found myself appreciating from the two hours I took to finish the game. For its length, the price tag may feel like a stiff one, but for an indie game with so much heart and charm, it’s worth the price tag.