The Stack

Two nights now, I have played Bookworm Adventures. And two nights have I fallen asleep playing it.

That’s sort of a double-edged thing to say. If it were a movie or a play, to say “I fell asleep” would be to call it boring. But in games, there’s the “I kept playing until I dropped from exhaustion” option. And honestly, it was a little of both in this case. If it were genuinely boring, I wouldn’t have kept playing even as I began to nod off. But it’s hardly exciting, either. It’s sedate. The background music is as comfortable and child-friendly as a lullaby, and the character animation consists mostly of things rocking gently in place. Aside from some optional time-limited minigames you can play for extra potions and gem tiles, it’s completely turn-based. And, since knowing what happened on previous turns doesn’t really help you much, you can actually doze off repeatedly during play without your performance suffering much.

Still, my mental state meant that I didn’t really process the plot at the beginning of chapter 2, when my first session ended. When I came back to the game the next day, I had no idea who the player character was talking to or how they met. The story element in this game is pretty light, though, and doesn’t affect player decisions at all; mainly it’s just a series of excuses to put you through different monster themes. Which is not to say that it’s bad — the whole thing was written by Stephen “Bob the Angry Flower“ Notley, and is full of his sense of humor. It’s more G-rated than Bob, and I’d almost say it’s less gratuitously absurdist, but then I remember that it’s a story about a worm in spectacles who fights legendary monsters inside books.