A Guidebook of Babel Reviews

I love the logic map story setting! Very Playful and totally worthy!

i'm sad to say i just don't find this game fun! the tutorial is very long and ends up feeling more confusing than anything else. like, the achievement for "you have finished two quests" (and they are both heavily tutorialized) has under 50% of players. that's pretty damning imo. i hope a lot of people are loving it -- the reviews are good! -- but want to make sure people who don't click with it don't wander past the refund point without some additional info.

Very cute art, great music, introduces an interesting time-travelling and rewriting mechanic, and fairly logical. It is a bit simplistic, and maybe best suited for kids, but it has a compelling-enough story and experience that I had a good time playing through myself. Also, contrary to other reviews, you can make progress in the storylines without filling out the deduction notes completely; I've done so multiple times. The notes are mainly there to help you if you're stuck. Rewriting an event does require unlocking the applicable quest first, and the game does make that clear early on.

Amazing setting, solid story, very cute art and character design, pleasant soundtrack and incredibly boring game. I feel very conflicted because in the beginning this game had so much to offer and it became bland and uninteresting right after two or three levels and that's kinda sad actually. Hopefully, dev team will come up with something better in the future

I really wish Steam had a "mixed" recommendation option, because I am very on the fence with this one—I'm only picking "not recommended" because the majority of the reviews are positive. There are both things I really like and things I really dislike in this game. This game has a very whimsical setting that is fun to explore. Another reviewer called it "Pratchett-esque" and I 100% agree. There are a couple of things that sort of broke my suspension of disbelief (the game is set in a pseudo-1930s but seems to have arcade cabinets and and an internet messaging platform?) but for the most part these things added to the eclectic feel of the setting. The story, while nothing particularly groundbreaking, is paced well and very interesting to unravel given that it's told nonlinearly from 4+ POVs; I had a lot of fun following along and trying to guess its various twists and turns before they were made explicit. Most of the characters are fun and have interesting arcs—I was especially invested in that of the first player character, Braith, who ends up having a fairly emotional storyline with his kid Lake. The character animation does a lot with very little; even though most of the animations seem to have been made by just puppetting the sprites around in-engine, they are so charming and give so much personality even to minor side characters. The art style is detailed and a little weird in the best way, and while I found the UI to be unintuitive at first I eventually got used to it and grew to really like the presentation of the game, especially how the main menu was framed as the titular Guidebook of Babel. Unfortunately this game is deeply hampered by entirely too much hand-holding across the board. The tutorial is too long and forces the player through a circuitous series of steps when the actual solution is simple and obvious, and seemed to be written under the pretense that the player had never encountered a video game before. Even once you're past the tutorial, the hand-holding continues in the form of one of the worst hints systems I've ever had the displeasure of encountering. Each stage has a "Note Page" that walks the player through every step in the logic to solving each puzzle, which ends up feeling extremely patronizing and completely spoils the puzzle solutions. The puzzles in this game are really not that hard—I avoided the hints system as much as possible and never once got stuck for more than a minute or two, which makes the inclusion of this style of hints system all the more baffling to me. The hints system only justifies itself in the final chapters, when it's remixed to be vaguer and the puzzles are more complex, but the entire first half of the game just doesn't let the player solve anything on their own if they decide to use the hints (which they are very strongly pressured to). The game only forces the player to use the hints system once, during the tutorial, so it is mostly avoidable—except for the fact that three separate achievements are related to using the hints system. Ough. Other reviewers have mentioned that the English version of this game was translated imperfectly from Chinese. I did not personally find this to be an issue—while the English wasn't completely flawless, it read to me more that the game's script needed another round of editing to catch typos and awkward wording, rather than that the game had been translated poorly. I would not have guessed that it was written/translated by a non-native speaker if I hadn't read other reviews of the game. The errors that were there certainly never impeded my understanding of the story or characters. My final issue with this game is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but I haven't seen anyone else bring it up in the other reviews or discussions, so I thought I would mention it—there is a group of characters in this game that somehow plays into anachronistic stereotypes of both Native American and Romani people for no good reason. At one point, a real-world slur is even used in reference to them. It really is only an aesthetic choice on the part of the developers and has nothing to do with their role in the story. Especially knowing the developers are Chinese, I don't think this choice was made to be disrespectful, but the design of these characters is still tasteless and off-putting. I can only hope the English version is eventually updated to remove the slur, at the very least. In total: if you like this sort of narrative adventure game and are willing to put up with hand-holding, you might have a lot of fun with this one. If you're not a fan of games with a predominant focus on their story or are looking for meaningfully difficult puzzles, look elsewhere. The game is not particularly expensive and seems to go on sale periodically, so if you think it might be up your alley it's certainly worth a shot. I don't regret buying or playing it, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to others unless they were especially into this style of quirky point-and-click and I knew they wouldn't be too bothered by its flaws.

I would give a mixed review instead of a purely "Not Recommended" one if it were an option. I think that A Guidebook of Babel is probably a skip for most adventure game enjoyers but it did have a number of redeeming qualities. I enjoyed the concept of the timeline-changing mechanic, and the charming artstyle and surprisingly deep worldbuilding added a unique character to the game, However, the game was not actually particularly fun to play. The lack of logical consistency of the puzzles and the overdesigned and frankly unhelpful "note" system felt a little frustrating, and the dialogue, clearly not written by native English speakers, came off as bland and made it harder to become invested in the story. That being said, I did still feel compelled to finish the game instead of quitting halfway through and the story's ending was satisfying and well-written. I can tell that the creators had a lot of passion for their project and I'd be interested in checking out more games set in the universe of the Babel if the gameplay mechanics and the quality of the English-language writing were improved.