Book of Hours Review

Book of Hours
Developer and Publisher: Weather Factory
Platform: PC
Release Date: August 17, 2023
MSRP: 24.99

There’s mindbending games, and then there’s Weather Factory. The small indie studio headed by surrealists Lottie Bevans and Alexis Kennedy have put out a variety of games, everything from a bizarre digital card game about losing your mind while forming a cult (Cultist Simulator) to immersive experiences, to their own tabletop game (The Lady Afterwards). Building on their previous work, they’ve unleashed another unusual but nonetheless engrossing offering, Book of Hours. It’s a strange mix of virtual furniture rearranging, gameplay based around gaining forbidden knowledge and hidden skills, and navigating your visitors and neighbors as you explore a massive house and attempt to craft a great work. It’s also vast, deep, and the kind of game you can lose weeks to. All in all, it’s an exciting new entry into their canon, and a worthy successor to their first sleeper hit.

Because of an unspecified incident, you are appointed the Librarian of Hush House, a sprawling Gothic library on the cliffs of Brancrug Isle. After a storm washes you up on the beach, you get yourself acquainted with Brancrug and your new environs, restoring the rooms of Hush House with the assistance of the locals and cataloguing any books you find. You have bigger ambitions for the forbidden knowledge hidden in these halls, however, and it will take all the skills and unusual gifts you gain from your books to achieve the transcendence you secretly seek.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

Book of Hours is played out on a huge and expansive map of Brancrug and Hush House. Using a variety of skills, powers, items, and other help represented by cards, you perform various actions across the map— unlocking new rooms of the house that might do different things with your abilities, cataloguing (and studying) the vast library of randomly-generated books, dealing with visitors and locals alike, and upgrading your skills to further access forbidden knowledge on the “Tree of Knowledge” map. More skills and more abilities allow you access to a larger range of powers and knowledge, propelling you further up the tree and gaining more stats. The game works on a day-night cycle, where everything refreshes (and all temporary cards vanish) at daytime, and different actions are available at morning, and evening.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It sounds vast and complex, and it sort of is, but the presentation helps keep it simple. The game begins with your arrival on the beach with only a waterlogged journal and a memory of the storm, and teaches you the concepts of the game from there, with your first challenge being to choose your stats and then get off the beach. From there, you move into the town, and then set about opening up the town and the labyrinthine environs of Hush House itself. New mechanics have a barrier of entry (move to the next area, learn the right skill, generate enough resources) to get over, but once you get over that barrier, you find yourself integrating what you learned into the next set of mechanics. It’s vast and complex, but it’s understandable in a very specific way.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It also expands into a dizzying amount of depth. Apart from unlocking the rooms of Hush House, you can craft occult items, pump the townspeople for any recent omens they saw, enlist the help of townsfolk and visitors, and use the rooms for a variety of savory (and unsavory) purposes. Each new room you unlock comes with its own new set of abilities, uses and decorations. There are secrets (what do those busts on the grand staircase mean), a ton of flavor text and narration to get into, and a number of ways to craft. You can even start exploring the Moors, the Beach, and the Tree, the last of which is a map that, in classic Weather Factory fashion, exposes itself beneath the main game screen as a bizarre network of lines and pathways all leading to…something. The further you go down the rabbit hole, the more you understand, and the further you can get, leading to a sense of accomplishment as you learn the game’s ins and outs. Book of Hours makes you work hard for its secrets, but it does want you to find them, and you don’t usually find yourself waiting for the next thing to do.

That said, the game moves at its own pace, and it’s a slow and relaxing one. While there are clocks to keep track of, they’re long enough that you can figure things out slowly, and the day-night cycle lets the player know you’re going at your own pace, as long as you keep that pace slow. It’s a game about figuring things out and getting to know your area— there’s no obvious lose condition, Book of Hours is generous on time, and while the requirements for some tasks and progress seem daunting, you have more than enough time to work things out. After all, a library is a place for quiet, methodical contemplation and research, not a desperate race against the clock.

Helping all of this, the map and the corresponding Tree are gorgeous. Building on the stained glass/art deco style of Cultist Simulator and Lady Afterwards, Book of Hours features a lavish but abstract view of Brancrug Isle, Cucurbit Bridge, and the all-important Hush House. The rooms are also excessively detailed, with a variety of different furniture and components you can move around to your heart’s content, all of which also have properties you can further use in your work. As you get into the interlocking systems, half the fun is seeing what card will come up next, or what new room will open up, or what new item you can place in the library. Everything also changes with the seasons and weather, shifting to snow-covered skeletal trees and hilltops for Winter, autumn leaves, or…well, that would be a spoiler. It’s just another way the game integrates the environment as part of what it does.

Credit: Weather Factory

While the game is an absolute delight for the senses and mind, it does have a few caveats here and there. You have to constantly zoom in and out around the map, as it’s huge and you’re quickly able to lose track of what you’re doing. There’s also not really a way to keep track of all the processes you initiate, so occasionally something will go off, sending you scrolling back and forth around the map to find the exact point. Sometimes you’ll even misclick on the background or something else, closing the window you opened and opening a different one, or bringing up another tutorial message. It’s a problem quickly solved by zooming in, but it can be exhausting to navigate, especially later in the game when you have multiple processes running.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

The game can also be somewhat daunting in scope. Something might happen before you’re completely ready, leaving you wondering how you’re supposed to come up with 5 Forge to fix something that might be a problem down the road. Finding specific categories means sorting through a tremendous amount of clutter— and while sorting the clutter and organizing the rooms and redecorating is the point of the game to some degree, the somewhat inaccurate placement mechanics and sheer vast amount of space you can open up can be somewhat mind-boggling.

But Book of Hours is in an early state. There’s plenty of time to fix these minor bugs, and gazing into the infinite while rearranging your sprawling library is kind of the point of the game. While it might be a little sprawling, that’s very much the point, and it’s a welcome new addition to Weather Factory’s bizarre universe. If you let this game in, you will lose whole weeks to its engrossing depth and complex interactions. It’s a beautiful expanse of a game that stretches outward from the vertical slice seen during NextFest, and it demands you invite it in.

The Good:
- Beautiful artwork and top-notch integration between theme and gameplay
- Vast, sprawling game of interlocking systems to explore
- Tons of flavor and setting
- Simple but deep card-based gameplay

The Bad:
- Sprawling and vast game means scrolling across the map multiple times to find that one card you placed
- Becomes difficult to keep track of things in the mid-game with too many pieces moving around

Final Score:

It’s got its rough spots and a very specific audience, but you’ll never play another game like it.

Shadows of Doubt Early Access Review

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Shadows of Doubt
Developer: Cole-Powered Games
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Platforms: PC
Release Date: April 24, 2023 (Early access, information on the Steam page claims “about six months”)
MSRP: 19.99 USD

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By now, Shadows of Doubt is a well-established title in what looks to be a fabulous summer of immersive sims and shooters. Its six-month early access period shows it growing by leaps and bounds (part of the reason for this review being a little late is that I wanted to give it a bit of time to cook, so to speak), and its unorthodox focus and procedural story-generation engine make it stand out even among the high number of narrative-generation games coming out these days. Unfortunately, as wonderful as Shadows of Doubt is, it’s worth waiting for a full release rather than snapping it up in early access. The high number of moving parts and that same unorthodox approach to things means it should take all the time it can to shine.

You are a former police detective in a dystopian island city, laid off by the Starch Kola Enforcers Program, a corporate-run police force installed by the corporate-owned government. In the middle of a night of troubled sleep, you awake to the ring of your phone. Upon answering, you’re greeted by silence on the other end of the line and a note shoved under your door urging you to investigate someone’s apartment. You arrive on the scene, finding a corpse. There’s been a murder. The Enforcers are on their way and react to trespassers with lethal force. A conspiracy is brewing. The same strange video tapes and cryptic notes show up at crime scenes and in suspects’ apartments. You’re down on your luck, recently evicted, and have to dodge both enforcers and the criminals who are on to you as you attempt to solve crimes and take odd jobs. Good luck. You’ll need it.

Shadows of Doubt is best described as a “detective/crime immersive sim.” You take cases from various notice boards around the city, gaining money and social credit for everything from petty theft to corporate hatchet-jobs. In the process, you get embroiled in conspiracies, murders, and a shadowy “paradise” people retire to when they have enough social credit. As you grow in both reputation and skillset, you unlock upgrades called “sync-discs,” have an easier time getting information, and get ever closer to finally leaving the rain-soaked concrete pilings you call a home. From a first-person perspective, you chase down leads, manage your time and needs, and try to figure out your cases in a procedurally generated city. You also get to customize your own character, apart from their backstory.

The password to a secret gun store Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It’s remarkable how much detail and how many moving parts go into Shadows of Doubt. The game procedurally generates the entire city from the “new game” screen, complete with citizens, schedules, buildings, and a whole ton of relationships. Over the course of one case, I practically traversed the city (and if you don’t play on the largest city size, well, you’re missing out) and met a ton of potential suspects and leads, all chasing the same single thread. You can break into places, bribe informants, sneak into the Enforcer offices to steal files and weapons, crawl through vents, and even confront a suspect, arrest them, rob their safe, and then sell it all for a tidy profit. It’s wildly open in a very guided way, supporting a number of chaotic and careful play styles. The first time I turned off the lights in a room and the cameras stopped paying attention to me, I was hooked. You don’t normally see that level of detail in a game, where even minimal changes to the environment yield greater results, and knowing more about the city means you solve cases easier. Helping everything, a lot of your legwork is player generated, meaning you have to follow the leads and draw conclusions, even if you make the wrong ones.

Foggy day in post-global warming Tokyo Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It also looks great. The style, blocky voxels making up a neon and rain-soaked hellscape of a city, works perfectly with the retro-futuristic cyberpunk tone the game tries to strike. While the streets look a little similar at times (par for the course with a procedurally generated game), you get awesome neon signs standing out of the fog, and characters have an impressive level of distinction, with everything from styles of dress and cybernetic limbs on display. You can even learn a lot from what any given person has in their apartment or workplace— everything from medical issues to coworker relations are represented by items, emails, and a number of subtle details. There’s a lot going on, and the style never once gets in the way. It’s a fantastic presentation.

Fog billows up through a room Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

The issues with Shadows of Doubt come down to polish. There are points where the game just doesn’t click right, whether it’s accidentally soft-locking yourself out of a murder case because you went to City Hall and grabbed yourself a case sheet before following the vague instructions to investigate a murder on a random street, or getting turned around because following an address waypoint leads to the wrong building. It’s frustrating, in a way, but that’s the reason the game’s in early access. It still needs a little more time to cook, to work out that polish and smooth out some of the rough edges. This isn’t a nitpick so much as a statement of fact. Even the most polished of games sometimes just needs a little time to cook. A little chaos is fine, in fact, it’s built into the game, but I’d wait until this one hits 1.0. It’s a great game, but when a great game has a crack, that crack’s all the more visible.

If you’re enticed enough and can weather the lack of polish, Shadows of Doubt is a fantastic game, an instant indie classic for fans of immersive sims, film noir, and weird dystopian adventures. While that’s the case, the game’s improved almost weekly in leaps and bounds, so it’s definitely worth the (relatively short at this point) early access cycle and hopping on with 1.0. Either way, check this out, especially as the unpolished version is a beautiful, impressive, and chaotic affair well worth your time.

The Good
- Brilliant dystopian-noir setting
- Unique voxel-graphic style
- Huge level of detail and freedom in the open world
- Large number of player options and open-ended gameplay

The Bad
- Literally the only bad thing about this is that it’s still in early access and could still use a little more polish

Final Score:

Age of Decadence Review

I just trashed a city's infrastructure for the mob.

I was totally justified in doing so. My character was serving the Commercium, the entirely unscrupulous merchant's guild who runs the trading quarters in every major city. They plot and conspire all over the place to topple the ruling houses in the cities where they work, and they're pretty much the closest thing this world has to the mob. So now, because of me, they control the city's military as it descends into lawlessness, and they could probably take over whenever they like. The scary part is, that's probably not even the nastiest thing I'll do this playthrough. 

This is Age of Decadence, and it's possibly one of the best games I've played this year.

The Age of Decadence is an isometric roleplaying game from Iron Tower Studios. I came across it early in its development after hearing it talked about on a gaming site, and in particular, after an interview with the dev team. From there, I followed the open development as much as I could, downloading each new release and dying frequently with each new character I made. This game has a history with me. 

The thing that makes me absolutely love the game and come back to it again and again no matter how many times I die or screw up, though, is that the game is that deep. The game begins with a message that combat is highly lethal, and it would be better to negotiate your way through each situation. You can get through the first act of the game by only killing one person, or if you really want to see how low you can get your body count, you don't have to kill anyone at all (this won't make anything any easier). The game is incredibly open-ended, and even failing a quest in one way will give you options to succeed at another. 

And it's beautiful. There's technically no "wrong" path, and while there are certain paths that will leave you without many good options, each choice follows on the back of other choices. Screw over a local lord? He's not going to want to put in a good word for you. Fail too many missions for someone? They're not going to trust you with the fate of their grand schemes. Fail to decipher that inscription? Then it's probably not best to operate that piece of machinery. The world is essentially yours to do with what you like.

There is just one problem, and it's sadly one worth mentioning. There is a lot of trial and error, and there's a high barrier of entry that comes with that. You'll find yourself not necessarily save-scumming, but testing out situation after situation to figure out what does what, and at which threshold. Even if you specialize enough, there's a chance the skill level thresholds are just too high, and it is that way by design, not by any cruel trick. I had to try several different combinations before I figured out the right way to approach situations. My advice: Pick up Streetwise and pump a lot of points into that. And Lore, too. 

But in the end, is it all worth it? Absolutely, yes it is. You will not find a more player-driven game this year, with the possible exception of Fallout 4, which hasn't come out yet. While the barrier of entry is ridiculous, it's also rewarding. Seriously, check this one out. Also-- the demo is the first town of the game. For you to explore. For free. There is no reason not to at least give this a look.

Final score: 5/5

Full disclosure: Reviewer received a press copy of this game