When I smoothed the folds of the ancient book for the first time in front of the workbench of _The Bookwalker_ and watched the words on the yellowed pages float like fireflies, I suddenly realized that this was no longer an ordinary puzzle game. This Russian work turns the handmade art of book binding into a meta-narrative adventure that shuttles between literature and reality.

The game opens in a dystopian world embargoed by words. I played the role of Andre, a writer who was deprived of his creative rights for writing “dangerous ideas”. In order to save his sister, he was forced to become a “bookmaker” — by repairing ancient books to sneak into classic literary works and stealing key items in them in exchange for real-world resources. But what really makes this setting magical is not the time travel itself, but the perfect combination of “repair” and “infiltration”: each repair process corresponds to the special ability to enter the story world. For example, if you repair the cover with gold stamping tools, you can get a chivalrous aura of courage in the world of _Don Quixote_; if you sew the off spine with silk thread, you can weave a safe climbing path between the chapters of _Moby-Dick_. The most memorable thing is that when I repaired _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_, I needed to find hidden annotations through ultraviolet light development, and this ability allowed me to see the secret marks left by other walkers in the story.

With the increasing number of stories of infiltration, the game shows amazing literary insight. In the world of _Crime and Punishment_, I need to manage the “conscience value of the character”. Too much theft will make the scene bloody and full of hallucinations; in _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_, logical puzzles will change the rules according to my choice, just like the famous crazy tea party; and in the chapter of _Frankenstein_, assembly The small game of the corpse directly corresponds to the question of life creation and responsibility in the novel. The most exquisite thing is that the visual style of each literary world strictly follows the context of the original work: _Moby-Dick_ adopts a black-and-white woodcut style, _Don Quixote_ is a faded knight manuscript illustration, and _Alice_ is a digital reproduction of Victorian color illustrations. This respect for the texture of literature makes every infiltration seem to really enter the minds of different writers.

The most profound setting of the game lies in its discussion of “literary ethics”. As a walker, I constantly face a choice: whether to roughly take away the key items to cause the story to collapse, or to find a more sophisticated way to reduce the damage to the original work? In the level of _The Hunchback of Notre-Dame_, if I forcibly take away Quasimodo’s clock, the whole church will collapse; but if I complete a series of hidden tasks to restore Hugo’s manuscript first, I can get a replica that will not destroy the story. There is no simple right or wrong in these choices, but they force players to think: where is the boundary of responsibility when we break into other people’s stories for realistic purposes? The archive interface of the game is a thickening “Walker’s Log”, which not only records the progress, but also the follow-up development of the stories changed by me — some of which have become richer because of my intervention, and some of which have lost their original glory forever.

Late at night after customs clearance, I stroked the real _Don Quixote_ on the bookshelf. The most precious gift of _The Bookwalker_ is that it makes me re-understand the “materiality” of books — the weight of paper, the smell of ink, and the touch of binding are not simple carriers of information, but the physical basis for the existence of the world of stories. In this era of electronic reading, this work gently reminds us that every page turn is a time travel, and real reading may be the most legitimate “traveler” that all of us can become.

If you have also been deeply changed in your life trajectory by a certain story, this work will give you the most unique resonance. It is not only telling stories about books, but also inviting you to be a part of the story — after all, in the world of words, every reader is a permitted infiltrator, and every time he closes the page, it is a return with harvest.