Bookwalker is one of those games that break my heart to give a thumbs down. It is not a trash game and it's not broken, but it's also so uninteresting and bland that I cannot in good conscience give it a good rating.
Long story short, Bookwalker is a point-and-click game disguised of what else you want, with a veneer of choices matter but that actually doesn't, and with a minimal but intrusive addition of J-RPG style combat. Between chapters you'll have to navigate some boring and uninteresting walking sim segment to advance the meta story. The main gameplay loop is: waste some time doing the same repetitive task six times, then jump onto a book where you'll be pixel hunting and exhausting all the dialogue trees and chasing resources to create tools required for progression, rinse and repeat. Two or three times per chapter the game will throw you some J-RPG battles where you slowly improve your skills between chapters and which require little to no thinking. No single system in the game is awful, but also none of them gels together into something great.
The standout element of the game is the graphics, which are really good. High-quality textures in the first person segments, and really nice overall design in the isometric mode. The problem is that whenever you have particle effects on the screen, your FPS drops from 140-150 to 15-20, and some areas rely heavily on those, compromising framerate. Also there's an overuse of screen blur on the first-person segments, which is just annoying. While I generally love the artstyle, a lot of characters lack portraits and there are little to no animation on the first-person segments, which just looks jarring and reeks of lack of polish.
There's no voice acting, just mumbles, which is acceptable but not incredible. There's forgettable music - the best track is the combat track, but it's a bit repetitive. The sound effects on the first-person segments such as microwave sounds, steps running away, phone ringing and background noise are high-quality but feel a bit tacked on.
And then, the story. It has good stuff there, but it's lost in its own ambition. The idea that writers can commit book crimes, lose their licenses to write, inhabit books, interact with characters - that is mostly good stuff. The rules are never clear but I'm in for the ride. The main issues I see are with the individual books and the choices system. Each individual book is interesting, but too shallow and short to truly shine and flesh out, and you're over before you get attached to them, just to be thrown into the next one. All the while, there isn't much happening in the first-person segments, so it feels the best parts of the game are over before they matter, and you're stuck with the least fun bits of it progressing at a glacial pace. Then, there are the choices, and here the game is infuriating -- it gives you the illusion of choice, but doesn't respect or persist your choices, always either forcing you to pick what it wants, or just commenting on your (usually binary) choices on a very heavy-handed manner, that diminished the impact of them. For a game about books and writing, its writing is quite poor. Ain't that ironic?
In short, I came here after playing Disco Elysium hearing I might like this one, but this game is so confused, rushed, unpolished and poorly-written that it can't be recommended. Is it broken or trash? No. But it still hardly deserves your time.
