BOOKBOUND BRIGADE

A pretty novel concept

There are millions of books in the world, and that means millions of characters. Bookbound Brigade sees you take control of some of literature’s most famous personalities, including King Arthur, Dracula, and Queen Victoria. Your task is to journey through various interlinked literary landscapes in order to retrieve the precious, purloined Book Of Books1 and, ultimately, restore balance to the Literary World.

Mechanically, Bookbound Brigade is a metroidvania with lots of puzzle-platforming and combat. Each member of your brigade has a unique ability, 2 and you have to utilise the whole team’s talents in order to progress. You control all the characters simultaneously as one block, though you can vary their formation so they can reach high points, go through tunnels, and so on. Your brigade also fights as one, with every member slashing at enemies when you hit attack. Delightfully, having such big egos in close proximity results in a lot of quirky humour, with dialogue playing on the characters’ famous tropes to great effect.

As your rag-tag band explores the Literary World, they collect Memory Pages, either from other literary and historical NPCs or from treasure chests. These reawaken memories in your brigade, and the more you collect, the better your brigade gets at fighting as they remember past battles and former glories. Unfortunately, completing what amounts to a series of Memory Page fetch quests can become tiresome.

Overall, though, Bookbound Brigade is an enjoyable, colourful and quirky game. A good read, but maybe not quite a pageturner. Rebecca Stow

FOOTNOTES1 Charmingly, the Book Of Books is known by the characters as BOB for short. 2 For example, Dracula can swoosh his cape to give you a double jump ability.