Ratings and Reviews by Audiart

Right away I thought, this game is for me. The bookstore, the proprieter, the cat. I felt like I was really the protagonist. Yes, a nice big, juicy, literary game. I walked all over the store getting ready to dive into something big, exploring everything, looking for stuff to pick up, petting the cat, trying to read books, or anticipate the direction the game would take.

However, none of this yielded any result (except petting the cat.) It turns out that almost none of the locations or objects in the game are necessary. I got tired walking through the unimplemented rooms, and felt frustrated by the feeling of constantly following a red herring. All that the player must do is following directions given you by an NPC (go upstairs and look for this, go downstairs and bring me that.)

Conclusion: Great setting, no puzzles. For a game called Bibliophile, there is astonishingly little to do with anything literary. On the contrary, as another reviewer mentioned, I was truly thrown off by the bad language of the librarian - not only unwelcome but contextually inappropriate. For me this game was exhausting but not rewarding. As it turns out, the best part happened in the first two minutes: naming the cat.

I enjoyed the humorous yet mature writing style, and the titular character much more than the game itself. The only real puzzle is figuring out the solution to the crime, by interviewing all of the suspects. Ultimately the main character is so likable and funny that going through every dialogue option was buckets of fun. You will find yourself going "back" to check all of the options.

The character of Bell Park is one of the most well-developed teen characters I've ever seen in IF. Although in general I despise twine games, I think the format really worked for this game. It would have probably been less interesting as a short story, for example, because part of the fun was going through all of the different dialogue options.

I would recommend this game to people who don't like Twine format in general, because "Bell Park, Youth Detective" really plays more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book than the typical moody avant-gardism infesting the genre.