Book of Travels – Review

Our Score: 8/10

Ready your pack, grab your walking stick and step into a world of mystery and legend. Craft a unique character and immerse yourself in the enchanted lands of Braided Shore. Set your own goals and adventure alone or together with Travellers you meet on the road in the Book of Travels.

Book of Travels is a TMORPG. That’s right, it’s a Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG. What does that even mean? Well, each world or server has only a handful of slots for players. There are no guilds or societies. And the reasoning for that is to make encounters with other players, more memorable.

What is Book of Travels

“Braided Shore is a vast and intricate world, but meetings with other players are few and far between so your chance encounters will be something special. Choose to collaborate together or to survive alone, either way, you’ll be part of the birth of an exciting new online community, one where many stories will be told.

But take note: This is a game for wayfinders and wanderers and it won’t plan out your route. Instead it will trust you to play in your own style and to shape your own journey. Whichever way you choose to travel, you’ll soon be adding your own chapters to Book of Travels.”

Book of Travels by developer Might and Delight is an incredibly unique take at RPGs and story-telling. It’s a proper roleplaying game with character creation and everything. But where it differs is in the character sheet itself. Instead of choosing or rolling for stats and classes, you pick your personality and identity.

Furthermore, the game itself has a lot of randomly occurring events. This means that every time you play, your session will play differently. And this is important to make a world feel alive and reactive to your actions.

Another way the game is different is in communication. You can’t just go into all chat and type something out. You communicate in this game using symbols. And you learn these by encountering new places or features. So every interaction you have will be an interesting one.

Look and Feel

The world of Braided Shore is breathtaking. It’s a hand-painted diorama where you click to walk around. But, the world and the scenes also have 3D depth to them. So instead of going just left and right to move around and explore, you’ll also be going in and out. It’s really cool when you get the hang of it.

And the use of colours and the “delicate” and soft style with which the world is painted is incredibly relaxing. There’s something so soothing and immersive about this game that you can’t stop yourself from falling in love with it.

Sadly the one place where the game struggles right now is with its gameplay. Namely, the bugs. There are way too many bugs present in the game right now which will absolutely pull you out of your immersion. Thankfully, the developer team is quite active and are already working on a major bug fix patch. The game is still in Early Access and has quite the roadmap for Chapter Zero.

Final Verdict

Book of Travels spins the MMO genre into its own cute little diorama world that is bound to leave you spellbound and coming back for more. While the game does suffer from bugs and a comparatively less amount of content, I’m incredibly excited to see where this game goes from here and hope they achieve what they’ve set out to do.