As I think I’ve shown in my previous entries, my dream projects don’t follow a set format. There’s no consistent era or genre or design paradigm I’m looking to follow. I have a lot of great loves when it comes to video games. I have a mental vault full of beloved-yet-dormant titles I am aching to bring into the now. Some are games I have longed to make for decades. Some are more recent revelations. As is the case with this one. This game is an edutainment classic. It flipped the script and rewrote what word games could be. Take a seat, would you? And join me as I turn the page on one of my favorite games of all time, Bookworm Adventures.
Previously in these dream project posts, I’ve called out the first entrant in a series that I’d like to reboot but I’m not doing so here. No mistake: the original Bookworm is a super fun game. But its sequel, Bookworm Adventures, gave the core word-building gameplay structure and freedom that are essential to a modern reboot. Developed by PopCap and published by EA, the first Bookworm hits shelves way back in 2003. It presented the player with a matrix of letter tiles. The player selected adjacent letters in an order that created words. Once the player had a word, they submitted it for points. The selected letters would disappear, letters would shift down appropriately and new letters would appear in the now empty slots. Like Boggle meets Tetris and you’re in the ballpark.
As a word game nut, I love pretty much every kind of spelling, typing, and word search game out there. As an educational tool, it pushed players to test their pattern recognition and vocabulary skills. It rewarded you for finding big words and for using less common letters in your submission. I loved loading up Bookworm as an idle distraction, the same as others did with Minesweeper or Solitaire. I love words. I just do. Don’t judge me.
It’s fair to say that a game like this doesn’t really demand a sequel. English is always evolving but, really, you could just update the game’s built-in dictionary if you wanted to amp the app’s rizz. Or whatever. Look, I’m old. So I was happy that, when EA and PopCap did release a sequel in 2006, they pushed the core premise in a fresh direction.
Bookworm Adventure retains the core gameplay concept of the original but adds two very important changes. First, the letters you select don’t need to be adjacent. Any letter in the grid is valid. Tap any letters in the field to create your word. Second, it wrapped the gameplay inside larger gameplay. The game was played in a series of battles where the player, as Lex, entered classic works of literature and myth and faced down the monsters within to retrieve items and save characters. You fought the monsters by making words. The bigger the word, the rarer the letters used, the higher the damage. The player and the monster trade turns so, after you do your action, the monster gets to go. The monster can do damage to you through various attacks like biting and clawing. Lex has health just like the monsters and if his hearts drops to zero, he’s knocked back to the beginning of the current chapter. Monster use more than just damaging attacks though. They can stun you so you lose a turn, small tiles so they can be played but get no points, heal themselves, and other fun tricks. Along the way, the player gets treasure items that boost the scores of certain letters, increase Lex’s health limit, act as shields against damage, and other things. Lex also levels up, gaining bonuses to anything from health to defense to damage. New tile types will enter play that will deal extra damage, decrease enemy effectiveness, and give buffs to our invertebrate hero. Calling it “Adventures” wasn’t a shallow subtitle but an engaging, well-explored wrapper that adding loads of gameplay to already fun game.
In addition to the main mode, Adventures has mini-games and challenges, as well as comic intros and monster info you can unlock as you play. It’s a robust package—far more engaging and thought-out than folks expect from something sold as an educational game for children.
As I said above, Bookworm Adventures is technically the second game in the word game series, following the original Bookworm. It was successful enough to spawn a direct sequel with Bookworm Adventures: Volume 2 but that’s it. Volume 2 built on its predecessor by featuring new stories, wild card tiles, an Infinite Replay mode, and companions—characters such as Mother Goose, Monkey King, and H.G. Wells—who each with their own ability that aids Lex in his journey. The original Bookworm was ported from PC/Mac to mobile to XBLA to the Gameboy to the Nintendo DS—all over the place!—but that it’s the only series entrant that saw life outside the home computer.
My history with the game is pretty simple: I picked up Bookworm Adventures from a spinner rack at OfficeMax sometime in the late-00s. (That spinner rack was a trove of amazing finds, by the way, from educational to hidden object to classic point-and-click. If you took an MRI of my gamer heart, you’d see that spinner rack front and center.) It was an obvious buy for me. I liked the previous Bookworm and this sounded interested. I didn’t pick up the sequel until a long time after.
Now is a perfect time for a Bookworm Adventures reboot. The format is a slam dunk for mobile. I already play a bunch of word games on my phone. One that had a story, fun rewards, daily challenges, alternative play modes, and some non-predatory monetization? You kidding me? It is a straight-up crime that I can’t download a new Bookworm Adventures on my phone. In fact, the idea for this dream project came about after a search for “bookworm” on the app store returned a bunch of clones but nothing official.
If any of this has enticed you to check out Bookworm Adventures, that makes me incredibly happy. This game deserves to be played. Unfortunately, I can’t just drop a link here for you to easily obtain your own copy as, sadly, the games were removed from sale online back in 2016. hy was Bookworm erased from the digital shelves? What does the future hold for Lex and his myriad adventure buddies? I have no idea. Could a new Bookworm Adventures happen? See my previous answer. Obviously, I would love to see Lex crawl into the sun again—and I’d love to have a hand in writing his future. But that’s ultimately up to PopCap and EA who, as far as I know, still hold the rights yet haven’t said a word about the game in over a decade. If anyone knows of an initiative to turn a new leaf on Bookworm, I’d appreciate your putting a word in for me. Until then, I don’t mind rereading the stories yet again.
