The DS family of handhelds is home to a lot of interesting titles, which forgo the traditional gameplay for other elements, such as a story or unique experiences.

“Book games” are among these. The term can be understood in a couple ways.

One is simply games where you do a lot of reading, like visual novels. Again, (3)DS has a lot of these, such as the popular Professor Layton series and many others.

Then there are games that make you hold your handheld sideways, like a book. The most well known is Hotel Dusk, that also falls into the first category. But there are a few more, especially Japanese exclusives (see comments under that article).

And third, there are also actual books you can read on the (3)DS, such as 100 Classic Book Collection

I’ve been wanting to play Hotel Dusk for a while, got the cartridge a few years ago but only explored a little. (So use the spoiler tag, please.) While I’m personally not a huge fan of visual novels, the design of (3)DS that allows to get two screens into a handheld, makes it the most practical device for these.

Well, do you like books in your games, or do you prefer the more traditional ones?

  • kratoz29@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I like the premise, although it is not the best experience for extended sessions I think, the ones that come on top of my mind are:

    • Hotel Dusk and its sequel, I’m actually gonna replay Last Window again because I forgot almost everything about the plot lol.
    • Ninja Gaiden, I enjoyed it a lot, maybe I have finished it three times or so, I can see die hard fans of Ninja Gaiden not being fans of this title for obvious reasons.
    • Inkheart, I played it many moons ago, and even when it was a movie based kind of game I think it did okayish, I mean, I liked the premise of the movie about book characters coming to real life, as a visual novel I think there are some others which are much better though.
    • Louise@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I knew there was a horrific-looking movie for Inkheart and I was a fan of the original book, but I didn’t know there was a game adaptation of the film adaptation. Wild!

      • kratoz29@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        lol, I didn’t even know there it was a book based movie talking about other book characters that then it got ported to a game, how meta.