Buyer alert: it’s a point-and-click adventure and has the same pitfall as many other similar games: you get stuck really often. There are too many clues / things / characters, and overlooking some seemingly minor thing may prevent an important event from triggering. Like not taking a turn or not talking to random character in the crowd or not talking to a character you already talked to, whatever. And don’t be fooled by the overbearing and long-lasting tutorial that seems to explain everything! It’s still not enough, you will get stuck and use online guides to find out where exactly you missed out. And the fabled “butterfly effect” mechanic makes everything messier, not easier. Don’t buy this game if you don’t like this kind of stuff.

What a wonderful game. Definitely a highlight of 2023 for me.

I don't think I've ever played a detective game where each puzzle was set out so well. I could see the pieces lining up as I found them, and when it was time, putting them together to discover what to do next was incredibly satisfying. Too many mysteries rely on twists that you can't see coming to try to surprise you or subvert expectations - this game is proof you can make a coherent experience that just lets itself unfold and it'll be so much more enjoyable because you can follow along.

This isn't a game so much as a slightly interactive story. You have a list of restrictive tasks to move the plot forward and must execute them without exception. This could have easily been a cartoon or something else. Honestly couldn't wait for it to be over.

Edit: Wrote this review before actually rolling credits. This game does not respect the player's time to the very end. Such a tedious slog! Save the money and buy something else.

This game is a journey. A journey that is a mix of time and space travel, afterlife exploration, touching stories of intertwined human destinies, darker, subtle references to real history events and political factions, script writing and butterfly effect wrapped in cheery, surrealistic cartoon graphics and quirky unique backgrounds…

… Nothing of which I was able to pick up from simply glancing at the game page. I’m not even sure how I ended up with a demo for it. Probably was going through one of my OCD-like phases where I was willing to give any game (even if it looked like nothing I’ll ever be interested in) a try. Most of the time it’s a total waste of energy, here though, here I was glad I took a chance on “The Guidebook of Babel”. It’s certainly … something, and the attempt to summarize my experience would probably end up incoherent, but you can blame game’s complex structure and originality and not me. Something else is always at fault, of course.
I fear that if I’ll try to put it all in paragraphs, each will be hundreds of words long, so I’m just going to do a bullet point list instead. Here’s the low-down of the process, dear YOU:

- You start playing a game filming a pretty strange movie, when an even stranger book falls from the sky, unraveling a world of everyone involved.

- You play on the ship that takes humans into the afterlife using quite unusual methods.

- You play as 4 different characters at once. Some of their agendas directly oppose each other. For example, there’s a character who’s trying to escape and a character who’s trying to capture him. You’ll be both.

- You don’t play them simultaneously, but rather in an erratic manner, where quite often you get the choice of what to do next.

- Your main goal is to follow through their journey and re-write past occurrences to trigger butterfly effect and change their adventure and the film script you’re going through.

- You make deductions of events and their consequences in order re-write events that actually matter.

- You marvel at the inclusion of the darker side of history that could go unnoticed if you don’t pay attention to it, as nothing is named outright.

- You admire the wacky world with tons of original lore and the way it’s interconnected with the human world.

- You empathize with the deeply developed characters, stories of which do tend to be on the overly dramatic side for the sake of the plot, but they all have layers to them and make you think.

- You question how the hell all this could be done in the graphic style chosen. It comes simultaneously almost too kiddy and yet reminds of the children’s books back in the day, when illustrators weren’t above the foray in the world of quite hard surrealism.

- You find the varied, lively soundtrack to be a great accompaniment to this extravaganza.

- You finish this wild ride of a game (where the butterfly effect gets increasingly complex and has you travel across many scenarios of several characters to invoke the change) satisfied and, maybe even touched a little, when it comes to final goodbye.

- You think: “Huh, well that was a lot more involved than I ever thought it could be. I had fun. This little odd game turned out to be quite the surprise, and I’m glad I stumbled upon it.”

- You go on Steam and you write a review, making sure to point out not only that it was fun for you, but also that it was peculiar and might not be for just about every adventure player. You make a note that the (quite lengthy) demo is available, and, perhaps, would be the best option for those who simply aren’t sure about all of this. After all, that is how you started on this journey too.

- You close Steam and ponder some more. You hope these developers will make more great games in the future. You turn off your computer and go off into the real world, finding yourself still thinking about “The Guidebook of Babel”. If only you could go back and re-write some things in the past…

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.

What is death?
What will be our biggest regret when we die?
Who will take us over in the after-life?

While the art style of A Guidebook of Babel is cute and casual, under the cover, the game is handling such a heavy topic - death and love. With perfect portion of humor along the journey, the game moves you, but won't make me sad, left with warmth in my heart.

Almost no one had an easy life in the game, but they are not trapped in the past, life goes on.

It's hard to describe how i feel after playing, all I can say is time/money worth spent.

hope you can enjoy this game too.

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 like the idea, i just dont like story based games that have me doing/watching the same things over and over
i know how to solve the puzzle but the game wont let me until we come back later at some point cause i need to do this way first...
most of this game is
trying to rewrite...............................................failed to activate
and
i think thats a bad idea

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.

A Journey Through Time and Destiny!ヽ(´• ω •`)、

In the vast and ever-evolving landscape of the gaming world, there are titles that stand out not merely for their graphics or mechanics, but for their ability to captivate players with intricate narratives and mind-bending puzzles. One such gem that emerged from the shadows of 2022 is "A Guidebook of Babel," a story-adventure game that boldly weaves the concept of the butterfly effect into its very core. Developed with a flair for innovation by a team that clearly values both storytelling and puzzle-solving, this game takes players on an unforgettable journey through time, destiny, and the intricacies of human memory.


Set against the backdrop of the enigmatic Babel, the game opens its doors to players, inviting them to embrace the unknown. The premise is intriguing - death is not the end, but a gateway to an afterlife where memories are treasured as fuel. The Memory Extractor, cloud cannons, and a diverse cast of characters who evoke empathy and curiosity lay the foundation for a world that is equal parts mysterious and relatable. As players immerse themselves in this narrative labyrinth, they find themselves armed with a pen that rewrites the past, unfurling the intricate threads of fate.

Upon setting sail on the Babel, players are treated to a visual feast that ranges from drenched decks to bustling stations and empty giants' boilers. The attention to detail and artistic direction amalgamate to create a world that is simultaneously enchanting and eerie. The journey is shared with an eclectic ensemble of characters, each harboring their own challenges and aspirations. From the pilot battling monsoons to the circus clown on a quest to reunite with his daughter, these characters interweave their fates in a symphony of tragedy and comedy.

The heart of "A Guidebook of Babel" lies in its ingenious gameplay mechanics, which infuse traditional word adventure elements with modern sensibilities. The butterfly effect takes center stage, encouraging players to delve into the past, identify pivotal moments, and ingeniously alter events to rewrite history. The gameplay mechanics are bolstered by a clever use of a notebook, guiding players to assemble evidence and construct logical chains of reasoning. While some puzzle designs might appear straightforward at first glance, they belie a complexity that rewards the discerning player with a sense of accomplishment.

One of the game's most remarkable achievements is its ability to constantly surprise and challenge players. Just when you think you've unraveled a level's secrets, the next level unfurls with an unforeseen twist, a testament to the developers' commitment to engaging storytelling. The game's pacing and dynamic design ensure that monotony never creeps in; instead, the urge to explore intensifies, pushing players to decipher the enigma of Babel and its denizens.

Yet, beneath the fantastical exterior lies a narrative that resonates on a deeper level. "A Guidebook of Babel" is not merely a tale of a ship and its passengers, but a reflection on human existence, choices, and the fragility of memory. It masterfully intertwines the past, present, and future, and as players unravel the layers, they discover the profound interplay between individuals and their stories.

In conclusion, "A Guidebook of Babel" isn't just a game - it's an intricate tapestry woven from threads of imagination, intrigue, and ingenuity. It's a journey through time, where the past is a malleable canvas and the future a result of the delicate strokes of a pen. As players embark on this adventure, they'll find themselves not only immersed in a world of mystery and wonder but also challenged to think critically and unravel the intricate web of fate. If you seek a game that blends absorbing storytelling with mind-bending puzzles, "A Guidebook of Babel" is an experience that deserves a spot on your gaming horizon. So, secure your boat ticket, step onto the deck, and let the carnival of Babel sweep you away on a voyage like no other.

Are you interested in finding some amazing STEAM games to play? Well, we have a fantastic suggestion specially for you! We invite you to join us, Nyanco-chan, on our YouTube & Steam Curator channel called Nyanco Channel. On this channel, we share reviews and recommendations for really cool STEAM games. You'll come across a bunch of enjoyable games that are sure to catch your attention. So, why not give it a try? Follow Nyanco Channel and let's embark on a gaming adventure together! (ฅ'ω'ฅ)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3017305192