Game Review: Bookbound Brigade

With a title like Bookbound Brigade, you might think that this is one of those games that is designed to teach the younger YouTube generation the fun of reading. I would have to say no to that, but it does teach them the wonder of video games.

Bookbound Brigade is a platformer type of game, but with a new twist: the player is essentially six different characters, at least to start. These characters include King Arthur, Robin Hood, Dorthy Gale (from The Wizard of Oz) and more. All of these characters are from different literary classics in a weird kind of team reminiscent of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but these are characters from all different literary times.

All these literary characters learn strength in numbers as they go through all kinds of worlds. The story has to do with all these characters lost in this odd mystical library, and then there are all kinds of Metroidvania stuff to do. You got to battle some serious monsters, and do some serious jumping to get to some checkpoints.

I’m going to say this about the gameplay, it is pretty difficult. Many of the tasks have to be completed by doing certain things in the group. For example, there are these platform jumps that are very precise, and they can only be done by stacking all these characters on top of each other. There are other feats that this group can perform, and I played it for a few hours and discovered several like jumping and swordfighting. The worlds are also interesting, and the group gets to bump into a lot of literary characters.

All in all, it is pretty imaginative. And if you don’t mind the difficult gameplay, you will have a lot of fun. I have a drawback with the map, as it was pretty difficult to follow. It wasn’t exactly intuitive when I looked at it, and honestly, this is a game that requires a lot of wandering around to find all of the great stuff in it.

Bookbound Brigade is available on the PC, Playstation 4, and Nintendo Switch for various prices on the game’s official website.