Take a Look… at Games About Being in a Book

Take a Look… at Games About Being in a Book

“I can be any anything, including a man with writer’s block whose wife might be dead”

There used to be a lot of stories about leaving the real world and entering the reality contained inside of a book. The Wishmaster and The Neverending Story are two well -known family friendly movie examples, but the premise has also been reversed for many more adult oriented stories, like Stranger Than Fiction, an underrated Will Ferrel movie where the protagonist learns that his life is currently being written by an author who’s planning for this book to end with his death.

But those movies are decades old now. These days stories about entering “the world of imagination” are more likely to involve video games. Tron, Free Guy, and even the recent Minecraft and Mario movies are all, in their own ways, about leaving the real world and entering game-based one.

That’s one of the reasons why Yoshi and the Mysterious Book stands out from other 2D Mario platformers. Despite being at least the second time Yoshi has jumped from his reality to the one contained inside some hand-bound pages, Yoshi’s new game feels uniquely quaint in its belief that in the year 2026, players will relate to a green dinosaur-frog thing that gets asked by a talking, mustachioed book to catalogue all the creatures inside him. 

Let’s take a look at some of the games that helped lay the groundwork for Yoshi’s new book-bound adventure.

The Neverending Story (Commodore 64, 1985)

People who saw The Neverending Story in theaters back in 1984 were in for a disappointment. The story does, in fact, end. But only temporarily. Not only were there sequels and an animated show, but the very next year also saw the release of a graphic text adventure adaptation of the film. Initially released for Commodore 64, the game was put together by a relatively small team. It isn’t nearly as long as the movie, but it had the advantage of allowing you to engage with the words of the story directly. Much as the film’s young, fantasy-hungry protagonist learns to influence the events of a book he’s reading in order to help Atreyu, the hero of his storybook’s story, you the player can influence Atreyu’s actions in the game through text in order to help him through various pickles and jams. 

It’s actually not as meta or strange as it might sound. They would have needed to get Douglas Adams onboard for that.  Still, the original Neverending Story game does a serviceable job of letting players enter the world of written text in a way that both adapts the film and works with its themes. And The Neverending Story games didn’t end there. A few years later, an action-based sequel called (you guessed it) The Neverending Story II hit the market, which was pretty bad, but was smart enough to play a MIDI version of the famous theme song on loop.

As it turns out, the real never-ending story was that song we heard along the way. It haunts the minds of everyone who’s heard it, like a manic luck dragon trying to break free from our skulls. Sometimes I’d rather have nothing, or even The Nothing, in my head than be haunted by that insidious chorus.

Comix Zone (Genesis/Mega Drive, 1995)

On a lighter note, remember superhero comics? It’s probably hard for young folks to imagine now, but there was a time when bigger comics could sell millions of issues a piece, peaking in 1991 with X-Men #1, which sold 8 million all on its own. Comix Zone, which hit four years later, was an attempt to capitalize on the comics boom while hitching it to the back of the ever-rising popularity of videogames.

The game stars a comic artist named Sketch Turner (groan) who gets sucked into one of his own comics, where he becomes a power-punching, pony-tailed party dude. Enemies are drawn by an unseen artist before his eyes, sometimes spitting out one-liners through word balloons, and each stage is laid out in panels just like a real comic. As if that weren’t multi-media enough, the game also came packed with a CD featuring songs by rock bands Danzig, Love and Rockets, and The Jesus and Mary Chain, truly cementing its intention to make you think that it was extremely cool and definitely not for nerds. 

But hard rock and innovative haircuts weren’t enough to save Comix Zone. By the time the game hit the scene, the PS1 and 3D graphics were on the rise, while the Genesis and comics were both in decline, leaving Sketch and his pals banging into bargain bins before they knew it.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA, 2003)

Final Fantasy Tactics was beloved on the PS1 home console, but all future games in the sub-franchise would be relegated to handhelds. First was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a GBA game that wasn’t exactly a sequel but still worked to keep the turn-based strategy style (and the 2D visuals) of the original alive. It also aimed to give the long-fractured franchise a more cohesive setting. The game takes place in Ivalice, the same land where the first Final Fantasy Tactics, the PS1 cult hit Vagrant Story, and the then-upcoming Final Fantasy XII all happen.

Or does it?

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance shows, at least according to some interpretations, that Ivalice may not be a “real” place at all. Early in the game, a young Final Fantasy fan named Mewt Randell spreads the magic of a book called the Gran Grimoire into his modern reality, transforming it into Ivalice. So it could be that all games set in Ivalice are actually just creations of the book. That’s a hotly contested opinion, though, not to mention a real stinker for anyone who hates “it was all just a dream” plot-twist clichés. But hey, if it’s good enough for Tommy Westphall, it’s good enough for Final Fantasy. 

Alan Wake (Multi-platform, 2010)

Books are key to the Alan Wake franchise. Specifically, the books of Stephen King. In fact, “Stephen” and “King” are the first two words you hear in the whole series. And, like a few Stephen King stories, Alan Wake is about a writer whose stories may be shaping reality around him. Throughout his first game, he finds pages of a book called Departure—a book that he planned to write but never got around to. Weirder still, many of the things appearing in these pages begin happening in real life, blurring the lines between in-game fact and fiction.   

We wouldn’t want to spoil the details, but rest assured that bounds of sanity, reality, and the power to shape them both in tandem all come into play. Yoshi wouldn’t last a second in this nightmare, but he might have a good time naming the various shadow monsters, mysteries and crime victims that Alan runs afoul of. Maybe he’d call those darn shadow zombies something cute like “Smokey Proggs”?

Beacon Pines (Multi-platform, 2022)

What do you get when you cross a traditional children’s story with the interactive power of videogames, plus the urge to make everything simultaneously adorable and foreboding at the same time? The developers of Beacon Pines answered that question with a relatively non-violent adventure game that takes place inside a furry animal book. Just as The Neverending Story had dual-leads in Bastian (a boy reading a fantasy novel) and Atreyu (the protagonist of that novel), Beacon Pines allows you to play as yourself flipping through the pages of illustrated kids book, and also as a goat child named Luka, the main character of said book.

Like so many modern horror games, Beacon Pines seems sweet and peaceful at first, almost tricking you into thinking it’s for kids. But there’s some T-Rated horror hiding underneath its accessible surface. Things get bad for these little pre-teen creatures, but thankfully, you can sometimes turn back pages of the book and reroute their story using special items called “charms” and change specific bits of text, like an editor of reality. Self-described as “Winnie the Pooh meets Twin Peaks”, its dreamlike presentation does a good job at making you believe that everything will be alright… just so long as you have the power to rewrite history. 

Honorable Mention: PlayStation 3’s Wonderbook System

Playing a game about entering the world of books can be a fun Inception “fiction inside a fiction” double-stuffed treat, but what if you could take a book in your real-life hands and make video games come out of it? Wouldn’t that be like magic? Sony sure thought so when they created 2012’s Wonderbook system for the PS Move motion controller and PS Eye camera, compatible with the PlayStation 3.

Under the banner of augmented reality, the Wonderbook process allows players to use the TV like a mirror, activating the tech by opening the book in front of it. The PS Eye camera scans the book and shows you flipping through it on your TV. On the screen, the game world rises from its pages like a pop-up book come to life. There’s one book about dinosaurs, another about Harry Potter, and my favorite, a comedy noir adventure about a six-armed private detective worm named Diggs Nightcrawler. To solve murders here, you can’t just turn the pages. You also have to flip it and tilt it to affect the environment. You can even take pictures of crime scenes with the PS Move pointer.

Sadly, these games aren’t likely to ever see a rerelease, as the tech needed to play them has passed its prime. Maybe some books are better left on the shelf, sure to surprise anyone who dares crack them open in the future.