Review: Book Bound – Is it a page-turner or is the binding snapped?

Book Bound is an adorable pixel-art game where you run your own bookshop. You have five different genres of books to stock: Fantasy, Non-Fiction, SciFi, Romance, and Thriller. Not only will you be able to sell these books, but you’ll be able to write your own books as well!

Book Bound: You’re bound to have fun, right?

In Book Bound, you play as someone who, more or less, inherits a bookshop. Why? Because a talking book said so. And bing-bang-boom, you’re a business owner! I really need a magical book in my life right about now…

It’s pretty simple as a premise since all the mechanics are straightforward, but it might be a little too much of the same long-term.

You play as someone who, more or less, inherits a bookshop. Why? Because a talking book said so. And bing-bang-boom, you’re a business owner! I really need a magical book in my life right about now…

Your whole job is simply stocking books. Your overarching goal is to sell one of every book from each category. I’m not sure how many individual books there are, but I sold a lot of Non-Fiction and it was easily around 20 books if not more and I’d only sold 50% of them.

As you sell books in a certain genre, you’ll unlock specific decorations pertaining to it. Mostly, it’s just decorative bookshelves, but you do get an end table and a decoration as well. In my experience, things other than bookshelves don’t really matter too much. They’re there for personal aesthetics only. And, you can’t twist things around as far as I could tell and I looked. So, everything needs to go in facing the same way.

Unfortunately, this makes decorating a bit harder, and in the end, I just decided to prioritize my books. I got two bookshelves for each type and 10 bookshelves pretty much did it for the space that I had.

When you’re stocking books, you want to make sure that you add same with same. You want all fantasy on the same bookshelf in order to get a bonus when you sell it. Likewise, when you unlock a fantasy-themed bookshelf, you want to put your fantasy books on it for even more of a boost. 

I know we’re supposed to sell all the books, but I want to collect all the bookcases

As you sell books, you’ll need to make sure that your shelves remain stocked for maximum boost. The good news is that you can buy books in the middle of the day. I thought I was being smart by keeping spare books in front of the correlating bookshelves to make it easy to stock. And, while that would normally be a good idea, it actually made things more difficult.

At the end of each day, you can unlock a new book for free and unlock a second one for a $50 fee. Generally, just buying those two new books is all you need to do. If you buy more, it’ll take longer to sell. You want to sell them quickly so that they count toward your individual book count. Once you’ve sold at least one of that book, it’s easy to just forget it and keep up with current things.

You’re not bound (haha) to your bookstore. You have the freedom to leave and walk around a little area. Outside, when you’re in the vicinity of someone, you’ll be able to shout out a sales pitch to those around you. This is just a slider minigame. You’ll need to hit specific buttons, sometimes up to 4 of them if you have a populated area. Hitting the button will pop up a picture of the people you caught the attention of and you want to keep them in the green area to make sure they come inside.

Otherwise, you can walk around, talk to people, find inspiration that just looks like letters, and even meet a very special duck. The duck isn’t hidden all that well, so I’ll just tell you that this “secret duck” will give you 1 coin every time you click it. I clicked it over 2,000 times (I’m not kidding), and it didn’t falter.

You can spam that as much as you like. I did it initially to help me kit out my store and then never had money problems after that. 

Where can I find a duck that spams money by being poked?

Let’s roll back a bit to something I said earlier when I mentioned inspiration and how they looked like alphabet letters. You pick up these “inspiration” letters and they’ll slowly fill an inspiration meter. You can fill this a lot slower by selling books, but finding the letters scattered around is easier.

Once you’ve filled the bar completely, you’ll be able to start a book of your own. You can pick the title and the cover and you can even add chapters. You don’t have free reign to type whatever you want, however. There’s a generator that supplies words that you can refresh as often as you like.

You don’t get anything special for making your own book, not even an achievement, but it’s pretty cool. Adding chapters costs half your inspiration bar and affects how much the book sells for. I put in 11, so I’m not sure what the cap was, but my book only sold for $26. So, you need a rather girthsome book to make a dent. It, honestly, might be better just to spam new books instead.

Lastly, when customers come in, sometimes they’ll ask you for a very specific title. There’s really no way to keep hundreds of titles in mind, so just say yes. A radar will pop up to tell you if you’re near the bookshelf that the book is on. And, if you don’t have it stocked, it’ll just tell you that the book isn’t found and you can tell the customer you don’t have it. Beyond helping customers and keeping shelves stocked, the only other thing to do is clean up messes that pop up randomly.

And that’s Book Bound. You sell books until you’ve sold them all. It’s very cute and it is fun, but because gameplay is doing the same thing over and over again, it can wear on you. And, the controls are a little finicky. You can play with a controller or a keyboard and I ended up playing with both at the same time. 

Sell the books, win the game

To stock books on the shelf, you have to click the book and then the place you want to put it. Four books per shelf means that you’re doing a lot of back and forth and it’s just so much easier to do with a mouse. Likewise, when you make a sale, you have to give change by clicking on $1, $2, or $5. So, the hybrid playstyle worked best for me.

If you’d like to give Book Bound a try, you can get it over on Steam. Otherwise, you may be interested in checking out one of our other reviews like A Game About Digging A Hole.