#plus he grew up in WWII and money could get you different amounts then than it can nowadays so he'd have to adapt to that too

[death-himself]

Nico probably has the weirdest concept of money, like he was raised in a likely really wealthy home, and he's the son of the god of riches, so he probably has something of a rich kid mentality. But at the same time he was homeless during the most vulnerable time of his life. I wanna know what goes on in that kid's head when he's making any sort of big purchase

[soloplaying]

Bendy and the Ink Machine: "Dreams Come to Life"

Guess what I got my hands on!

My Rating: I'd say...about 3 out of 5 stars. Or a solid B/B-

I really wanted to like this book, and there were aspects that I did enjoy. It was a quick and easy read, the original characters were engaging, and the last 30-40 pages were great! Unfortunately, too much of the rest of it felt like an original coming of age novel had taken a wrong turn into a back alley where our favorite BatIM characters happened to be loitering, rather than a novel rooted in the source material. It was unfocused and, while neither side of the story was bad, trying to mash them together made the final product a bit unsatisfying.

(I probably don’t need to say this, but…spoilers below the cut.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Meh:

The Good:

Buddy, Buddy's family, and Dot. I liked the focal original characters, for what they were worth. The author did a good job of making the reader feel for them and put a lot of effort into making them well-rounded. We just spent way more time with them than necessary.

The Setting. Joey Drew Studios, Buddy's home, and New York as a whole. The story was descriptive in a very sensory way, really making you feel the heat in that long-ago New York summer and the visceral differences between Buddy's world and Joey's farce. This was also effective at highlighting differences between Buddy’s perceptions at the beginning and end of the book.

Joey. Joey is the one game character in the book that received a decent bit of exploration and development. Buddy's initial infatuation with Joey's empty promises and charisma giving way to cold facts and the creeping horror of realization about how twisted he actually is...that's interesting to observe.

Sammy, Norman, Tom, Allison, Henry. To be clear, Henry's not actually present. At all. But the few lines we get about him are almost as much as we get from the game characters that are working at the studio at the time of the novel. What tiny bits we get about them are nice, though! Especially Sammy and the final conversation between Buddy and Tom.

The Studio. It feels properly creepy and convoluted. Since Buddy and Dot spend a significant amount of time exploring it, the studio's atmosphere receives a lot more focus than many other parts of the plot. It doesn’t quite match the game studio’s layout, but that’s a nonsensical mess anyways.

The Meh:

The Ink Demon. I couldn't figure out whether to put this in the positive or negative bracket so I'm leaving it somewhere in between. "Bendy" is properly terrifying and twisted and there's something that hits you right in the gut when you find out it's locked up in a tiny room alone, howling mournfully, when Buddy finds it. Then it gets out and starts killing people and that sympathy goes away very fast. However, it doesn't really feel like the Ink Demon from the game. In the book, it acts like a beast when Buddy sees it but, when you actually stop to think about it, its actions don't make sense for an animal driven by instinct. What is it actually doing most of the time? This might be a sign that it changes between the time of the novel and the game, but its actions in the novel are so contradictory that I think it’s a mistake. So....it's good as a typical PG-13 horror monster, but it doesn't feel like the Ink Demon, or "Bendy", despite the descriptions.

The Subplots. The many, many subplots. Don't get me wrong, I like Buddy, but hyper-focusing on him so much was extremely detrimental to the rest of the story. He had about six different things going on in his life and the first person POV meant the reader was stuck with him for every second of it. This brings us to the biggest problem in the novel and the cons section.

The Bad:

Buddy's Story. Thing is, it isn’t bad. It's a coming of age story about an artistic kid from the wrong side of town trying to find himself in post-WWII New York. It just...has nothing to do with Bendy and the Ink Machine. Even when Buddy is hired by Joey, there's about one page of studio investigation for every ten pages of Buddy's personal life struggles. It felt like the author started writing the first plot then tried to cram Bendy and the Ink Machine into it later on. And it really feels like the author cares more about the coming of age novel than the Bendy/Studio stuff. Joey was a key figure in the book but it was less about his madness driving the studio to ruin and more about Buddy trying to find a role model/mentor and being let down hard. (All of this is until the last forty pages or so, until Buddy talks to Tom and Allison at the party. Then it FINALLY feels like a BatIM book.)

The lack of time spent with the BatIM characters other than Joey. I liked what little we got of them, but I swear there were maybe ten pages, combined, of their roles in a book that was almost 200 pages. That includes Norman, Sammy, Tom, and Allison. Sammy might have gotten a bit more simply because Buddy thought about him a lot, but he wasn't actually present any more than the others, he just got name-dropped more often.

The limited first-person perspective. There are plenty of cases where this is a good choice, but in this book, it was very restrictive. Buddy didn't know much, wasn't interested in knowing much, and didn't focus on the things that the reader found most interesting. We all understand needing to make money to care for our loved ones, but he’s working in an increasingly demonic (haunted?) animation studio. Focus, Buddy! Every time the plot seemed to be teasing something interesting, Buddy ran away from it and, since we were tied to him in first person, we never got to see what happened after he left. If we’d cycled between characters in first-person, that would have been a different matter…but we didn’t.

The lack of Bendy. And Boris. And Alice. Buddy wants to draw, clearly, but most of the time, he just talks about learning to draw and wanting to make cartoons. The subject matter doesn't seem to be important, so even though we're in Joey Drew Studios, Buddy rarely talks or thinks about the titular character beyond lines on a page. The entire book, 'Bendy' just felt like a name dropped every now and then, not the beloved 'dancing demon'.

Buddy's Fate. Getting turned into Boris, I can accept. It's the rest of it. The whole "I took off into the depths of the studio where not even Joey Drew could find me and I watched as it grew and changed, then I decided to write this for Dot.". What? WHERE did he stay? And WHY? Joey was still sacrificing people, and he did nothing to stop it? What was he eating, if bacon soup wasn't all over the place yet? How did he remain undetected in the pre-warped studio? He had family - did he not try to contact them? What about Dot? She still worked there and understood what was going on - he never tried to talk to her? Send her a note? ANYTHING? Why did he write the book AFTER the studio was abandoned? On the face of it, this is a weak resolution, but it's actually worse – all of this is completely out of character for the Buddy we've come to know during the novel.

The whole 'mentally turning into Boris' thing. I get that Buddy's writing a retrospective, but we get a few paragraphs of rambling about his mental state every five chapters or so and it's never consistent – Buddy’s voice is the same the rest of the time, no matter how much he says he’s slowly sliding into Boris. It just serves to remind the reader that they're reading a BatIM prequel. It would have been a better choice to put a longer introduction from his human perspective in the beginning and a fragmented, more 'Boris' follow-up at the end to show the degradation of Buddy's mind.

*Sigh*

It would have been so much better if the author had followed a character more invested in the studio instead of their own life. If it had to be an original character in the current book, it should have been Dot. Better yet, it should have been Tom or Norman – they are both well-known game characters who were personally involved in the horrors going on behind the scenes and Norman came to an end just as bad as Buddy's. Plus, they would have been more focused on the game characters rather than the original characters.

I got the ebook for about $5 and I don’t regret buying it, but I probably won't read it again.

In Short:

The last 30-40 pages were great and everything you could want from a Bendy and the Ink Machine novel. The rest of it read like the author was trying to Frankenstein together a coming of age novel and a short horror story without much success. Other than Joey, that is; the 'unscrupulous, delusional businessman who pushes too far' character fit well into both sides of the story.