Get ready to fight Medusa as Robin Hood, Dracula, King Arthur, and Queen Victoria?
The cutesy literary-themed action-platformer Bookbound Brigade from Italian developer Digital Tales now has a release date. The game lets players take control of various historical and public domain literary figures on an adventure to find a magical McGuffin. Some of the characters playable in Bookbound Brigade include King Arthur, The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale, Dracula, Queen Victoria, Robin Hood, Nikola Tesla, Sun Wkong the Monkey King and the list keeps going.
The big character roster leads into one of the base mechanics of Bookbound Brigade, formations. In the game, players don’t control a single character; instead, they operate a team of up to eight characters moving in one of four formations, standard, line, column, or wheel. Different formations have different traversal and combat abilities, which are further affected by which characters are in the party. For example, Dracula can fly and carry the party over obstacles.
In terms of style, Bookbbound Brigade has a cartoony, not-quite-chibi art style, which plays into the mashup of all the different literary genres from which the characters come.
The story of the game was scripted by Little Big Planet’s Dean Wilkinson and centered around a magical book containing every word ever written called the Book of Books. At the start of the game, the Book of Books goes missing, and as a consequence, characters begin to vanish Back to the Future style, which sets the playable characters on a quest to recover the book. In pursuit of the book, characters travel across five locales, the Tower of Babel to Victorian London, and the lost city of R’lyeh, the dwelling place of elder god Cthulhu.
Bookbound Brigade will be available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC via Steam on Jan. 30, 2020.
So who’s in your cutesy party of side-scrolling literary adventurers?
