• Price: $19.99 USD (currently on sale for $17.99 until April 20th)
• Developer: Be Your Best
• Publisher: Devilish Games
• Release Date: March 30, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by Devilish Games on behalf of Be Your Best. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Although this is a site dedicated to video games, I also enjoy reading in my spare time. I may or may not have gotten in trouble for reading my books during instructional time in school as a kid. 😅 But that love of reading is unfortunately not the norm; it can be difficult to get kids to enjoy it. So I was definitely intrigued by the idea of BookyPets Legends, a game with the goal of using kids’ love of video games to get them to read more.

The game is set in the land of Imaginatios, a kingdom on the other side of the universe where characters from stories live. These characters are known as BookyPets, and they all have wings, which only work when kids on Earth read. (So I suppose they’re kind of like the Tinkerbells of reading?) Sadly, kids today aren’t reading as much, and the BookyPets have lost their ability to fly! To make matters worse, they’ve been captured by monsters! You meet a “Great Bird,” who tells you that your arrival in Imaginatios was foretold, and it’s up to you to save the BookyPets!

Players get to customize their avatar with different outfits and accessories. Options are limited at first, as you’ll have to unlock more items by rescuing BookyPets and reading their stories. There are over 50 BookyPets for you to rescue (including regular animals, dinosaurs, and fantasy creatures) across 3 different islands.

You start out on an island that serves as your home base. In the main building there, you can check your reading records and see how many words you’ve read, your record for consecutive days of reading, the number of stories you’ve completed, and different subcategories of literature. It seems like a good tool for parents/guardians to check in on their child’s progress. When you exit the building, the “Walkway Witch” will help you travel through portals to the islands with the BookyPets in exchange for a spell scroll. Each of the 3 islands correspond with the 3 types of BookyPets (Hard work, Bravery, and Fellowship).

Once you’ve arrived at one of the islands, you can start rescuing some BookyPets. They’re all trapped inside dungeons on the island, and each BookyPet dungeon has a minimum level requirement to enter. Meeting the level requirement allows you to use a Revelation Spell to find a story hidden in the dungeon’s entrance. Read the story and answer multiple choice questions to access the dungeon within.

Dungeons are not too complicated – they’re short experiences that involve you jumping across the occasional hole in the floor, opening some treasure chests, and fighting some enemies. There’s only one battle per dungeon, and they’re fairly simplistic. The battle system is more passive, as all you really do is summon BookyPets, who automatically start fighting enemies. There are several lanes on the screen, and you can summon multiple BookyPets in each lane after waiting for the others to get out of the way.

If enemies manage to get to your side of the battlefield without a BookyPet in that lane to protect you, it could result in your defeat if they damage you enough. Thankfully, if you do end up losing it’s not a big deal, and you can try again. The objective is for your BookyPets to defeat waves of minor enemies to get to the boss at the end of the lanes. Their success or failure seems to depend on how well you’ve upgraded your BookyPets’ stats. There’s no grinding involved – you just have to use upgrade items found in treasure chests, or earned by reading and leveling up your character.

I did wish that we could use all of our BookyPets in battle on each island; you can only use them on the island where you got them. (Players also don’t get to ride their BookyPets or even have them follow you around. 😔) I also think that the battle system could have been more interesting. When you walk around the islands, there are characters who will ask you what a saying means. Perhaps they could have incorporated that into the battle system; correct answers would decrease enemy HP, while incorrect answers would decrease your BookyPets’ HP. Something like that could have made for more engaging combat.

After winning the only battle in a dungeon, you’ll reach the trapped BookyPet. A dungeon’s level requirement will also tell you how many keys are required to free the BookyPet there. You have to read a passage and answer two multiple choice questions about it for each key. The individual passages – often parts of an entire story – are never long. (Apparently, there are also some BookyPets that can only be freed using keys earned by reading a certain number of days in a row.)

When the dungeon level is low, like at 2 or 4, it’s not so bad, but once you get up to 6, 8, or 10 it starts to feel somewhat excessive and potentially overwhelming for kids. I think if they had used the 3 or 4 passages in a single story and increased the number of multiple choice questions instead of having 10 passages with 20 questions total, it would be much better.

I had other concerns about the reading and question sections in the game. When an NPC asks you what a stand-alone quote means, it moves you to a question screen that doesn’t show the entire quote above the multiple choice answers. Other questions were also formatted oddly; they would ask what a word meant but included a definition instead of a word in that question, with individual words included in the multiple choice options instead. On the plus side, there were only a few typos, and some rare Spanish that managed to slip by (Hermanos Grimm, a question or answer in Spanish, etc.).

They used stories by the Brothers Grimm, Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, and a couple of other authors. I liked these stories, and they tend to have good moral values. However, most of these stories were written by authors several centuries ago, and a few of the words or concepts felt outdated. “Gimcrack” was a word that I have never seen before in my life, for example, and people don’t tend to say they’re “betrothed” anymore. That’s not to say that the readings are unintelligible – they just could have included more common/high frequency words.

The bigger issue for me was that there are a lot of distractions while reading. Players will have to deal with animated lily pads and frogs floating across the text, stones appearing that need to be destroyed, or having to use a match to read with limited visibility. Sometimes the game has you “race” a beetle to get to the end of a passage.

Personally, I had a hard time concentrating on the content with everything else happening on the screen. I did appreciate that we can change some passage settings by pressing start to change the text size, font, darker backgrounds, etc. It just would have been better if the distractions were not included or at least could be turned off.

There are some good distractions in the game, though. If you want to take a quick break from the BookyPet dungeons, you can bring the stories you’ve earned for saving BookyPets to the Two-Headed Sequoia and read them there. You have to read several passages and answer their questions correctly to get new items for customizing your character. When you run out of those stories and finish changing your appearance, it’s back to rescuing BookyPets.

BookyPets Legends isn’t perfect, but I thought it had a lot of good, creative ideas to encourage kids to read more. One of my favorite parts was definitely the BookyPet designs – I thought that the character models and the character art were both really cute. I think kids could find the “creature collecting” part of the game appealing. I also think it’s great that they included some stories besides the classic fairy tales and fables; Spanish developer Be Your Best also added passages from Spanish authors such as Begoña Ibarrola to the game.

The reading mechanics could use some tweaking, but overall I liked what they set out to accomplish. And as an adult player, the battle system wasn’t quite how I’d want it to be, but I think the less complicated battles may do okay with kids playing. I’d love to see additional games in the series with some of the aforementioned issues addressed. I could see them doing BookyPets games using fairy tales from specific countries going forward, which could fulfill their goal of getting kids to read and it would also introduce them to different cultures.