Bookbound Brigade from Digital Tales is one of the oddest Metroidvania games to be released in recent memory. You play a group of characters from history and literature, banding together to rescue the pages of the Book of Books (or, um, BOB) and restore order to the literary world before all literature and non-fiction is destroyed forever. It’s just as weird as it sounds, and definitely not what you’d expect.
The group of characters you play is a group in the literal sense. Count Dracula, King Arthur, Robin Hood, The Monkey King, and Dorothy of Oz are yours to control, but they’re weirdly stuck to each other in a clump, much like the pages of a book. As you move around, they all move together, vaguely reminiscent of a stack of Disney Tsum Tsum plushies with weapons and inappropriate commentary. It’s easily one of the strangest experiences around, trying to navigate five characters about all together, having them hanging off the edge of platforms if you don’t fully make a jump or simply moving oddly. The physics of the game are equally as odd, making simple actions more difficult than they might be in other games.
Our literary friends have been inconveniently ejected from their books, and it’s their goal to reconstitute BOB and save the library. To do it, you’ll have to guide them through a variety of stories and tales, finding more compatriots along the way and encountering a plethora of literary and historical figures in a never-ending parade of cameos. All of this sounds really interesting and the idea of a game that traipses through some of the most famous stories the planet has ever seen sounds fantastic, but there are some hitches.
First of all, there’s the humor. The writers of Bookbound Brigade wanted it to be a comedy and it seems like they really attempted to tap a Monty Python vibe to write the script. Unfortunately, none of them are Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, or Eric Idle, and the humor comes off as incredibly juvenile. In fact, some of it is not only juvenile but downright questionable as the crew makes fun of Joan of Arc burning at the stake over and over again early on in the game. Things don’t get much better when a painfully crass Queen Victoria appears a bit later on, and the addition of Nikola Tesla and Cassandra (a prophet of Greek mythology) to round out the cast makes little impact on the quality of the jokes that fly fast and furious in every dialogue sequence. Ultimately, if you’re playing Bookbound Brigade for the story, you’re likely to be sorely disappointed unless you’re an extremely well-read 10 year old. The humor is too ridiculous for adults and too literary for most kids, making for a game with equal lack of appeal to all audiences.
Unfortunately, playing Bookbound Brigade for the gameplay is equally disappointing. Since your characters are in a clump, their movement is slow and clunky, making every single level a tedious slog. There’s no run button, there’s no way to speed up, and even jumping seems laggy. As you progress in the game, you gain various attack abilities, but most of combat is running up to extremely small enemies and jabbing the attack button repeatedly. No finesse or skill is required and the enemies are almost entirely filler. Eventually, you can move your group of characters into various formations to overcome obstacles, also granting you more powerful attacks, but even these are a mixed bag. Standing vertically or horizontally in a group allows you to juggle enemies, eventually throwing them if you don’t accidentally kill them first and stun larger enemies, letting you saunter up to them and beat them down, but it’s slow and inefficient. Defensive combat is equally irritating, forcing you to consume energy to block, and limiting what you can do in combat severely.
All of this wouldn’t even be so bad if the controls were responsive in any way at all, but they’re not. Changing formations requires you to hit the L shoulder button while pressing the face buttons (A, B, X, Y) and a direction. Half the time, by the time you manage to hit a button combination, you’ve either already taken a hit or didn’t hit all the buttons just right and fail to pull off the formation or attack, sabotaging yourself again and again. There’s no way to reconfigure buttons on the Switch and no good reason to have to hold down the L button to activate your formations. As a result, even the most simple combat ends up being an exercise in frustration.
And there’s plenty of combat in Bookbound Brigade. Probably more than there should be, especially considering how unresponsive gameplay is. You’ll spend an inordinate amount of time slowly inching through levels filled with lame environmental traps and puzzles that are tedious and altogether too linear for a Metroidvania of any stripe. Level design is atrocious, being both obvious and frustrating, and dungeons are littered with things like fire traps that hit you repeatedly as you try to activate your shield wall in vain over and over. Your crew moves so poorly that after successfully activating a shield wall to protect from a series of flames for example, you’re hard pressed to make it out the other side before the jets fire again, and then you’re back at the beginning, waiting for your shield to recharge painfully slowly so you can try again.
From level design to scripting to gameplay, Bookbound Brigade misses the mark again and again. The average player who thinks of games like Dead Cells, Bloodstained, or even Super Metroid when they think of the Metroidvania genre will not only be disappointed by it, they’ll likely be downright angry. On every single level, Bookbound Brigade is a swing and a miss. Even the graphics are poorly done, with foreground and background effects making for the occasional confusing area that’s hard to see. There’s simply not much to enjoy here, and by the time you’ve assembled your motley cast of characters, a couple hours have passed with very little going on and chances are you won’t give a damn about the story anymore.
Bookbound Brigade attempts to be light-hearted, silly, and fun, and it ends up being a grinding chore with little humor and a failed personality. This is exactly the sort of game that turns off the average gamer to indie titles, and at $20, it’s overpriced as well. If you’re unable to resist the allure of storybook characters and juvenile humor, this might be a game for you, but for the vast majority of players, this should be a hard pass. There are definitely better ways to spend your money.
This review was based on a digital copy of Bookbound Brigade for the Switch. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was the same on both with no issues. Bookbound Brigade is also available for PC on Steam and PS4. Please do not let Bookbound Brigade dissuade you from reading! Reading is fantastic and there are all kinds of great stories out there in literary fiction and despite the attempt of this game to turn people off reading forever, the characters and stories contained within are not only iconic, but also absolutely enduring! Go read a classic book such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Dracula, or The Journey To The West! You won’t regret it!