Bookworm Adventures Review

By Oliver Clare Published 16 April, 2007

The lexicon of love.

Version tested: PC

If PopCap's faintly sinister 'player profile' page is to be believed, playing its games on a regular basis will improve your reflexes, sight and memory, and help you cope with stress, autism, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis and addiction. I'm not in a position to verify any of these claims but - and this might be pure coincidence - I have noticed that my athlete's foot seems a little better and my piles slightly less itchy since I started playing the brilliant Bookworm Adventures.

War of words

BA is an irresistible turn-based side-scrolling combat game where you smite enemies by building words (the bigger the better) from a random selection of sixteen letter tiles. Magic items picked before a mission endow your annelid avatar with special powers. Potions and gem tiles received as rewards for spectacular blows allow him to regenerate health, remove curses and boost attacks with poison, ice and flames.

In the time it takes a dunked digestive to disintegrate in a mug of hot tea you will have learnt the basics. In the time it takes to fish out the resulting biscuity sludge you'll be well and truly hooked. PopCap lures you from location to location with a string of imaginative monsters and loads of witty banter. The first of three campaigns throws hero Lex into a colourful cartoon world inspired by Greek mythology. Every screen brings a new, unique adversary, a new speech-bubbled wisecrack, or amusing Hitchhiker's Guide-style 'monster lore' comment. For a game that makes no great comic claims, the humour is amazingly dense and well-crafted. Not since Psychonauts has a PC title made me giggle girlyly on such a regular basis.

Polysyllabic pummelling

'Bookworm Adventures' Screenshot 1

'I', 'N', and 'G' tiles are a bookworm's best friends.

When BA isn't making you titter, it's making you think, or feel good about yourself. With a choice of sixteen letters, even the littlest lexicographers are going to be able to make (slow) progress through the (early) stages of the game. By bombarding a beast with a string of four or five-letter words you will eventually whittle its health down to zero and roll on to the next screen. The real pleasure and challenge however comes from vanquishing opponents with ventricose verbiage. Smash an enemy with a mammoth gem-packed mouthful and Lex utters an extravagant compliment. Fantastic! Astounding! Awesome! Finish a foe off with a whopping word wallop and you get to watch a slow-motion coup-de-grace animation, and oooh and aaah and as your letter grid fills up with powerful diamonds and rubies. Until you've mugged a minotaur with the word 'gazebo' or murdered a mummified hound with the word 'dodecahedral' you really haven't experienced BA at its satisfying, surreal best.

'Bookworm Adventures' Screenshot 2

Take that you toxicological Toxophilite!

Moving into the second adventure - an Arabian Nights-style odyssey with genies, mirages, scimitar-wielding pirates, and a shifty Sinbad - tactics become increasingly important. Facing stronger creatures with more varied and powerful special abilities means you have to think hard before using gems and tonics, and cultivate potent grids in readiness for boss battles (each adventure features half-a-dozen such scraps). Later monsters can poison you, petrify you for a turn or two, steal your gems, devalue or disable specific tiles, or infect your grid with a spreading canker. Tense duels are guaranteed. By the time Lex arrives in Transylvania - the setting for the third and final campaign - even those with big vocabs and lots of patience will have been through a few sticky skirmishes.

The lack of time limits in the story mode keeps frustration to a minimum. Those that want to spend hours poring over a particular grid, and fiddling with different letter sequences are free to. Cogitation and experimentation would have been a mite easier had PopCap provided a way of shuffling tiles within a grid and inserting letter into an arranged word, but it's not a catastrophic omission. My biggest criticism is that the game comes without any form of embedded dictionary. Every so often you plonk down a collection of letters and accidentally form a weird yet valid term. I could reach for my trusty copy of Nuttall's Standard Dictionary Of The English Language ("Based on the labours of the most EMINENT LEXICOGRAPHERS") and (probably) find out what clavi, patrine, ungula, lum and barret mean, but it would have been nice if BA had told me instead.

Clocked in the jaw

'Bookworm Adventures' Screenshot 3

I never go anywhere without my stun-resisting Boots of Theseus.

For word-forging in a more pressured environment, there's a turnless arena mode. Unlocked at the end of adventure 3, this consists of Lex duelling a string of increasingly scary boss beasts against the clock. The creatures strike once a time bar has filled-up meaning you can't dillydally (or indeed, shillyshally). Once you've completed the story mode you also have free access to the three mini-games that punctuate the adventures. As interludes in the story these Boggle and Hangman variants are diverting enough; as standalone recreations they're a bit on the feeble side.

By PopCap's standards BA was an expensive and time-consuming game to develop (two years and $750,000). A fair chunk of the budget has obviously gone into the graphics. All 150-odd adversaries have his/her own look and movements. Assassins dart forward and jab you with poison-dripping stilettos, deck swabs sidle-up and stick their mops in your mush, hags cackle damaging curses and Erymanthian Boar bounce up and down energetically on your bonce. Money has also plainly been spent on testing. It might be tempting fate, but I don't think PopCap does bugs.

So, there you have it - one perfectly formed, endlessly absorbing, regularly amusing word game. If you're looking for some brainial stimulation, find logic puzzles like Sudoku and Slitherlink a trifle soulless, and have a nasty 'untreatable' case of leprosy or beriberi, then I really can't recommend Bookworm Adventures enough.

9 / 10

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy
Picture of Oliver.

About Oliver Clare

Read more articles from Oliver by visiting the Oliver Clare archive page.

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Comments (40) Latest comment 5 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Psi #1 5 years ago

    wow surpise of the day, must check this out

  • UncleLou #2 5 years ago

    Hehe, sounds great. First time I've heard of it, admittedly.

  • skillian #3 5 years ago

    As a Popcap game, I guess it's available on Steam?

    I'll check it out when I get home, cos it sounds like my sort of fun!

  • WriterUK #4 5 years ago

    Do it for the DS. Go on, Popcap, you know you want to.

  • simiankid #5 5 years ago

    This game has prevented me from writing my dissertation. Five days to the submission date now and I'm still tempted to go back and try and beat my 13-letter record.

    My only real complaint, aside from a few words that are definitely valid being missing from the in-game dictionary, is that the upgrades ('treasures' in the game) can't be used for your second run through of the adventure mode, you have to start from scratch each time. I slogged long and had for those treasures, and using them in the 'turnless' (ie frantic) Arena mode just doesn't feel like compensation enough.

    Aside from that, it's ace.

    /procrastinates

  • spadge #6 5 years ago

    My wife loves Bookworm (played it for 3 yrs or so). She got this immediately on release, completed it in a couple of days and then went back to the original game to better her score again - and hasn't returned to this since.

  • AhrimaaN #7 5 years ago

    so when is this coming out on xbox live arcade?

  • cools #8 5 years ago

    Fantastic game until completion. Somehow, the addition of the adventure simultaneously increases the excitement and addiction level to heights unavailable in the original, while killing this off entirely once the ending is seen.

  • mkreku #9 5 years ago

    Where can you get a hold of this? I think it would suit my girlfriend perfectly.

  • SirScratchalot #10 5 years ago

    I'd love to play it on the go. DS or PSP please?

  • espy #11 5 years ago

    Completely deserved score. Wonderful game!

  • ostrasized #12 5 years ago

    And if you buy it from PopCap, you get to install it on more than one computer.
    I've finished it twice now - once at work, once at home, and my girlfriend and both parents are hooked.

    I hope they're making a sequel...

  • el_pollo_diablo #13 5 years ago

    I had bookworm on the GBA and probably played it more than any other game.

    Hope this comes to the DS

  • RE*AC*TOR #14 5 years ago

    Looks good. Popcap are the balls. Been playing a lot of Peggle recently - very addictive.

  • rudedudejude #15 5 years ago

    How much is this?

  • Chim_chimma_nee! #16 5 years ago

    Loving the frontpage picture of that caterpillar. What kind of butterfly / moth will it turn into ?

  • JediMasterMalik #17 5 years ago

    Played the trial version of this and thought it was awesome.

  • Martin #18 5 years ago

    Free trial over at [link url=http ://www.popcap.com/launchpage.php?theGame=bwa
    ]http://ww w.popcap.com/launchpage.php?the...[/link]

    Well worth a try if you're into this sort of game.

  • weXer #19 5 years ago

    This game is perfect for DS, you could add some pretty sweet DS functionality to jazz it up.

    I think it's a great game. PopCap continue to narrow the gap between casual and hardcore gamers with gems like this. Peggle is also incredibly addictive, I challenge anyone to play for 20 minutes and not be hooked.

  • smelly #20 5 years ago

    The name alone made me think "meh".. then i read the review..

    Now i'm undecided...

  • smelly #21 5 years ago

    "Don't know if I can trust Eurogamer, after their Earth Defence Force review..."

    What was wrong with it?

  • weXer #22 5 years ago

    It also has a cool feature not mentioned in the review. The game can be played by people with varying spelling abilities. The game constantly adapts its difficulty depending on your skillz.

  • UncleLou #23 5 years ago

    Hohum. I just tried the trial version, and it didn't even know/accept the word "January"?!

  • Fatfish #24 5 years ago

    @ UncleLou - could it not be argued that January is not a "word", so much as it is a name? Does it accept any other similar options - such as days of the week?

  • smelly #25 5 years ago

    Just played the demo.. not sure it wouldnt get boring after a while..

  • smelly #26 5 years ago

    oh .. and it didnt accept some of my words, which WERE spelt correctly (i even alt-tabbed to check with word's in built speller :-) )

  • UncleLou #27 5 years ago

    @ UncleLou - could it not be argued that January is not a "word", so much as it is a name? Does it accept any other similar options - such as days of the week?

    That's the only expanation, really, but it's a bit weird, as "January" isn't really a name any more than "cherry" is a name for a fruit.

    Escpecially as it has accepted "FILA", which, as far as I know, is only a trademark...

  • JediMasterMalik #28 5 years ago

    Gah, you're merely not creative enough!

    For the record, I never had a problem with it.

  • Carrybagma #29 5 years ago

    hw abt a nce txty vrsn 4 teh mbls arf arf

  • OrgasmicMutton #30 5 years ago

    I've had Bookworm Adventures since January and I've got to say it distracted me horribly from my exams. Oh the joyous satisfaction of using a word like "mutilation" to finish off an enemy. Oh the feeling of content when using the word "metallurgy" on an enemy susceptible to "metal" words. Oh the silliness of defeating monsters with words like "artichoke."

    On another note as other's have mentioned Popcap's newest game Peggle is just as addicitive and great, though in a totally different way. I hope to be seeing a glowing review of that sometime soon as it thoroughly deserves it.
    Edited by 1 at 17/04/07 @ 00:41

  • Talha #31 5 years ago

    Downloading it right now. EG deserves kudos for highlighting such a game.

  • itamae #32 5 years ago

    Is there a way to change the resolution I'm not aware of? I like the demo, but it's horrible stretch-o-vision on my 1280x800 laptop display.

  • spliffhead #33 5 years ago

    EDF 2017 is cheese but...

    Go find a friend and play co-op, it's awesome.

  • PlugMonkey #34 5 years ago

    Downloading it right now. EG deserves kudos for highlighting such a game.

    Too true. Penny Arcade have also been banging on about it for months. Maybe I should actually try playing it...

  • UncleLou #35 5 years ago

    Pfft, you English types. In German, "Januar" is a word like every other noun. ;)

  • espy #36 5 years ago

    Miner: what Lou means is that in German, every noun is capitalized. So you can't distinguish proper nouns from normal ones in that manner.

    Januar ist ein Monat.
    January is a month.

  • UncleLou #37 5 years ago

    That's indeed what I meant. :)

    Spelling with a capital letter aside, I still have trouble accepting that "January" is a name like "Mike" rather than a general noun like "winter".

    Not that it matters much for the game, it's just an interesting linguistic debate.

  • Wendelius #38 5 years ago

    Since we are into linguistics, I also always get confused with uppercased month names in English as, in French, months, language names, days of the week, ... are all simply common names.

    The month of January started on a Monday
    = Le mois de *janvier* a commencé un *lundi*

    I speak French
    = Je parle le *français*

    Not sure where the difference originated. But good to know for me in the context of Bookworm Adventures. You learn something new every day. :)

    Both my wife and I downloaded the trial last night and it seems addictive and fun. Thanks for the review Eurogamer.

  • Popzeus #39 5 years ago

    Downloaded this after reading the review, and I really can't recommend it highly enough. Brilliant stuff.

    Although there is one REALLY annoying missing feature not mentioned in the review: why no option to toggle US/UK spellings?? Having to use the likes of "favorite" really irks me and stops it being the perfect word-lover's game it would otherwise be.

  • nickgodfrey #40 5 years ago

    I’ve downloaded the trial and it seems fun. Has anyone noticed if it has developed/improved their spelling?