Two numbers keep popping up when people talk about Bookworm Adventures Deluxe: $30 to buy the game and $700,000 to make the game. Is it worth either? Depends on who you ask. In our case, we give a cautious yes, though we’re sure we don’t like the trend of higher budgets and higher price points for a lot of reasons – but more on that later.
The game itself is a high-polish mish-mash of the original Bookworm and Dungeon Scroll, a cute and inventive game with much lower production values from years ago. While the basic challenge to the player is the same as most word games (make a big long word out of a random set of letters), the visualization of the success is done by a sort of RPG-like fighting game, where larger words “damage” a number of mythological opponents.
A nice point of the new Bookworm compared to most word-find games is that you need not choose adjacent letters in the box, so the challenge is a lot more like Scrabble than Boggle. That means people with large vocabularies will have an advantage – they will find naturally longer words. This is a lot more rewarding than finding the same 3-4 letter words over and over and over again. I love games that allow me to make really long words, and this is one of them. I managed to get “speechless” on one turn and I darn near called in my roommate to show him.
As for the RPG bit, we’re still debating on how cool it is. The thing is, it is done very well, with magic items and pickups that make making words much more fun, and some pretty fun and cute monsters… but you see, we’re a worm. A happy friendly bookworm named Lex. And no matter how many times I saw it, I just couldn’t make myself think that fighting as a big green worm was cool. I mean, the enemies were monsters and warriors with swords and shields and stuff, and I was… a worm. A big silly green worm that bopped them on the head to fight them.
The mismatch was really glaring, and made me wonder if they should have scrapped the “Bookworm” motif for something more honest to the feel of the RPG. But of course, even a first year undergraduate marketing student could have told you that throwing away the brand recognition of one of the most successful Popcap games would have been a mistake – which makes me wonder if maybe this just wasn’t the right design for the franchise. The smell of “we have a cool idea, and we have to force this license on it because we’re not allowed to make a word game without Lex” was on it, and that makes us edgy.
That being the case, the game is good. $30 good? Not sure about that – you’ll have to be the judge. $700,000 good… Well, we’re not sure about that at either. One of the best things about casual games has been the ease with which a young developer can jump in with a creative new idea and get himself heard. As the casual audience develops a loyalty to key portals, the portals have become pickier and pickier about what they will accept. All too often this quality bar is more about production quality than innovation, meaning that well funded mundane projects are getting put out there, but really innovative budget projects are finding that it’s harder and harder to get any distribution. What does that mean for us, the casual players? We’re going to see more Diner Dash and Luxor clones, and less really innovative games. And that’s a matter for concern.
But I digress. The final answer about Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is that it is a great little game, and regardless of how much they spent to make it, the demo is still free, so you ought to check it out. And maybe you’ll find that $30 burning a hole in your pocket. Check it out and see.
Review by
Nick Kojima
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