Book of Hours Preview/Demo Impressions: The Thinnest, Tastiest Vertical Slice

Credit: Title Art from Book of Hours

Book of Hours
Platform: PC
Developer: Weather Factory
Publisher: Weather Factory
Release Date: June 2023

Book of Hours, the latest upcoming game from bizarre art collective/writing duo/indie game studio Weather Factory, has tantalized fans with brief glimpses over the past few years, finally dropping a small playable demo during Steam NextFest. The game, which promises to be something like an “occult librarian simulator” with a similar interface and art style to previous indie smash Cultist Simulator, casts you as the Librarian of a mysterious clifftop library called Hush House, a punishment for some nebulous crime. In your capacity as Librarian, you catalog books, read forbidden knowledge, make nice with the townsfolk, and uncover secret Wisdoms that might lead you down dangerous pathways or cost you your sanity while giving you new skills.

The demo begins with you washing up on the shores of Brancrug Isle, home to the clifftop library of Hush House and the town of Brancrug Village. The Village is a town of suspicious people, requiring you to gain an introduction from an old friend before you continue your journey towards the Library. From there, you unlock a few locations— the local post office where you can send and receive letters, the local pub where you can hire laborers, and one of three places in town where you can gain favors and help: the local blacksmith, the rectory where the Vicar lives, and the curious duplex where the local Midwife and the Undertaker live together. Your goal (as much as there is one in the demo) is to rescue yourself from the beaches of Brancrug, find your way up through the Village, and eventually make your way into Hush House itself, where the demo ends.

The Wisdom Map from Book of Hours. Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

There’s a lot to love here. The expressionistic visual style, rendering everything out of blocks of color in a way that feels one part painting and one part collage. The return of Weather Factory’s unique adventure-game system, one that sees you collecting cards and slotting them into various actions around the map. Even the newer elements of the work, which include a scrollable map and the ability to arrange objects inside the individual rooms of your library. It’s very impressive, and the way the game handles larger map elements with progress bars beneath each location is a novel way to deal with the constantly advancing clock, letting the player see what’s going on as they zoom in and out of the map.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

The problem is that the demo is very short, comprising barely the beginning of the game (in fact, the demo ends when you get to Hush House, where the meat of the game supposedly takes place). It makes it difficult to get too many impressions from it. Book of Hours hints a lot at interlocking systems, from the simple (telling fortunes at the local pub for money) to the complicated (the upgrade tree is a dizzying web that dwarfs Cultist Simulator’s Mansus screen, with cryptic hints as to what you need to upgrade). Even getting off the opening beach requires careful and slow consideration of your options. What you get is fantastic and finely tuned, though, in spite of being abrupt.

Maybe that was the idea? Hint at something grand, show what you have for now in a sort of playable alpha format, and get people on board for the rest? If so, it’s certainly intriguing. Given the degree of control in the demo, one can only hope that the full game is as promising and broad as the demo suggests, the systems as deep as Weather Factory promises.

Regardless, we won’t have long to wait, as Book of Hours arrives in full resplendence this June for PC. If this is the thin vertical slice we’re getting so far, I for one can’t wait to dive in.

Thy Creature Review

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Platform: PC
Developer: MazM
Publisher: Growing Seeds Corporation
Release Date: Early Access as of February 19, 2022

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I want to talk about the difference between “obtuse” and “cryptic.”

It’s a difference few people consider in their storytelling. Most people think one is basically the pretentious version of the other, but that’s where they’re wrong, and not just because “pretentious” is the silliest possible insult for someone attempting something ambitious. No, “cryptic” is a mystery that definitely has something to it. Questions get answered, things are weird, but you know where you stand, more or less. It can be frustrating, but it can also be thrilling and odd and compelling. Carnivale is cryptic. Dark Souls is cryptic. Hell, Myst is cryptic. Every puzzle has a solution, questions have answers, and you only learn enough for a sense of accomplishment and to drive you forward into further knowledge. Cryptic is interesting. Cryptic goes somewhere.

Thy Creature is obtuse.

Obtuse can be a good thing sometimes, when you want to invoke the surreal or have things be weird or add difficulty. Sometimes “opaque” can be even better, just look at most adventure games from the 1990s— a dreamlike feeling, you have no idea what’s going on, but clearly you’re along for the ride. But other times, obtuse is just exhausting, like with Thy Creature. Questions are answered, but it never feels like those answers are satisfying. Progress is made, but it still feels like you’re standing still. It’s clear the game wants you to think something is going on, but it never feels like you make any progression in figuring out what that is. Which is a shame, because there’s the potential to be a really good adventure game here, if it didn’t fall into all the worst pitfalls.

Thy Creature stars The Creature, a patchwork abomination of body parts who is run out of a village and severely wounded by humans. The creature takes refuge in an unusual and ancient tower, one that haunts his memories. Once inside, he finds himself attacked by monsters and accosted by the tower’s trapped inhabitants, who have their own difficulties with memories, all of them looking for the tower’s owner, Victor Frankenstein. To climb the tower and unlock his own memories and experiences, the Creature will have to fight the mysterious monsters known as Nepes, rescue the memories of the tower’s other inhabitants, and eventually reach the top, all while confronting a variety of mysteries and puzzles along his path.

From the start, Thy Creature has a lot going for it. A gothic atmosphere, lovely music, a plot full of mysteries, and a rather unique art style and control scheme. It feels like a scaled-up RPG Maker game, one of those ones with a lot of places to explore, people to meet, and a story to gradually uncover as you do. The journal promises secrets to uncover about your new friends in the tower and a variety of interesting collectibles to track down, and it has all the makings of an interesting game with a lot of heart behind it.

The game even starts incredibly well, with a fully animated music video welcoming you to the world and showing the Creature’s journey to the mysterious tower, having burned his former home and trudged across the desolate landscape until he finally reaches his destination, the song full of emotion, the strings lush. The tower’s music is creepily atmospheric, and the opening hallways full of defaced and demonic paintings leading into “the fiesta,” a creepy birthday party with a noticeable shift in color scheme, is really effective. Noah’s suitably mysterious, and his guarded behavior combined with you finding his memories makes for an awesome introduction to what should be a compelling mystery adventure game.

Which it would be, if it weren’t so frustrating. Quickly, the core gameplay loop is established: Get insulted by Noah, seemingly your only companion in the place, do some switch puzzles to open up some areas, fight some monsters, grab more memories, then open the exit to the sub-area at which point you get insulted by Noah again, he tells you how to get to the next sub-area, rinse, repeat. This wouldn’t be so bad— each area has its own unique form of “nepe,” the monsters that siphon and hoard memories, putting them in little crystals— but when you realize that for the third time you’ll have to backtrack in and out of rooms, only for your reward to be minimal progress, it gets exhausting.

It also doesn’t help that while each area has its own unique look, the rooms within that area tend to get repetitive and patience with the puzzles tends to run a little thin. Especially when the puzzles get more complicated, meaning you have to move backwards and forwards, opening up pathways, grumbling as I have to essentially perform the same task over and over again, but more difficult this time. It feels padded, like they needed to make up the length of the game by artificially extending things, putting more obstacles and barriers between you and the story.

Which brings us to the battles. Battles in Thy Creature take the form of bullet hell maze sequences. You run around the maze path, dodging bullet patterns until a group of dark crystals appears, then pick up the crystals to damage the creatures. It’s novel, and there’s a sense of urgency at times, with bullets flying from every direction but limited movement keeping things tense. Combined with some interesting creature designs, this makes a lot of the earlier battles in a chapter seem really interesting.

But this, too, falls short. Bullet hell derives its name from the way it fills the screen with projectiles, forcing players to find their way through a seemingly impenetrable wall of light and color. It lives and dies on figuring out how to thread the needle with your hitboxes, to move through the onslaught and come out the other side. Thy Creature by comparison has an awkward hitbox, the limited movement also means you can get easily boxed in and slammed by that awkward hitbox placement, and while there’s some clever darting from cover to cover represented by environmental puzzles in the later battles, it gets frustrating when something representing a stuffed doll but evil shrieks and charges you at warp speed, rapid-firing clusters of bullets over and over again. The repetitive enemy design also doesn’t help, with there being maybe one enemy type for a whole area until the boss.

What’s most frustrating, though, is that it doesn’t always do this. When the boss battles come out, when the story actually progresses, when characters have tender moments together or the Creature tries to learn more about being human— when it’s the parts of the game you can tell the developers worked really hard on, it shines. The clouds part and suddenly you’re playing a game you’re invested in again. There’s a really cool boss battle against a monstrous mutated stuffed bunny that feels tense and epic, but then you remember it’s in Thy Creature or get hit weird because you forgot which switch dissolved which piece of cover, or because your hitbox didn’t cover things this time, and suddenly you’re brought shrieking down to Earth.

The game is still in Early Access, so it’s entirely possible that it’s just lacking in a little polish. Maybe if the pacing were a little faster, if the hitboxes on The Creature were a little clearer, if the regular enemy music wasn’t the same grinding drone, if there wasn’t as much wandering around trying to figure out the solution to a switch puzzle, this could be a stone cold classic. It’s frustrating, because I can see the game they wanted to make. I want to play that game. Hell, I still want to figure out more of what’s going on in this game and see if the story takes a turn. It felt like it was going to.

But it’s not cryptic. it’s not intriguing. It’s a game with a ton of frustratingly good elements that then repeats them over and over until you get tired of them.

And that’s just exhausting

The good:
- Interesting atmosphere
- Unique art style blending anime-esque visuals with gothic horror
- Unusual plot centered around unlocking memories and secrets in a mansion
- Gorgeous soundtrack
- Some interesting depth in discovering journal entries, collectibles, and memories

The bad:
- Frustrating, repetitive puzzles and combat
- Depth gives way to shallowness as the game moves along
- Glacial pacing makes all the rough patches that more obvious

World of Horror - A First Look Review

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Game: World of Horror
Developed By: panstasz
Published By: Ysbryd Games
Release Date: 2/20/2020

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World of Horror, recently released on Steam Early Access, is incredibly addictive.

You wouldn’t expect this at first glance. It’s a brutally difficult roguelike, rendered in one or two-bit graphics that make it look and play like someone emulated their favorite Japanese horror RPG from the ‘80s, with all the retro interface and design that entails. It looks, upon opening it up, like a game made for a very specific audience who will “get” it and fiercely defend it. But once you actually start to play the game and make it through the difficulty barrier of those early deaths (and there will be early deaths), it opens up immensely, turning it into a gruesome and tough but incredibly rewarding experience that only deepens the more you play.

Everyone loves puppets, right?

The plot of World of Horror is a fairly simple one. You are a paranormal investigator tasked with solving five mysteries in the seaside city of Shiokawa. Each one of these mysteries, which play out as short horror-adventure games, ties into a larger mystery surrounding a different randomly-chosen elder god. Solve the mystery, and you get a key to the lighthouse where you can finally disrupt the summoning ritual and banish the Elder God back to whence they came. Fail, and you die in one of a number of horrible ways, from being bashed in the head by a baseball bat-wielding stalker to getting infected by a horrifying plague of holes straight out of a Junji Ito story. Depending on how you play, you can unlock a number of achievements that add more “cards” to the story, a set of optional random encounters that add new elements and items to the game.

World of Horror plays out on its impressively detailed screens through a point-and-click interface, hearkening back to classic horror manga and PC games, each screen painstakingly rendered in 1 or 2-bit graphics using black-and-white shading. You select various icons and actions from your various menus, manage your inventory (four items at a time, plus your Item Storage box), and use a variety of spells and items to keep your characters (one of seven, with eight optional backgrounds to spice up your playthrough). Mousing over any icon or option tells you what it does, and while the game expects you to read through all the material you get and take a careful look at your surroundings and the screens they have on offer, it’s a very intuitive system. It does require a lot of reading carefully and figuring out what option does what, but as long as you pay attention to what’s on the screen, especially at the bottom of it and during the (rather frequent) combat sequences. Combat is handled by putting together a sequence of moves based on a time bar, assembling your defensive and offensive actions into a sequence before letting it rip and hoping for the best.

And there’s a lot of “hoping for the best.” The game is random and kind of unforgiving, and while the interface is intuitive, some things you have to figure out as you go. Mysteries, for instance, have multiple endings you can unlock and each run means considering which ones you play in which order— do you go for the grueling battle against a demon from outside space and time first, and then set up the breather at the end? Do you do the mystery where your impending doom (a percentage which serves as a time limit for the game, it reaches full and you lose) will skyrocket and then hope you can get it to go down as you do more mysteries? Do you dare risk the mystery where you’ve died repeatedly and barely ended up solving so you can get it out of the way, or risk coming to it weakened but with higher abilities? But while careful planning will help with a lot of this, sometimes the random events are just downright nasty, adding high percentages to the impending doom meter or ripping your stamina and sanity apart just moments from the end of the scenario. This is especially nasty in combat, where an enemy with a high rating will absolutely wipe the floor with you and shrug off your hits as if they’re nothing, even with the numerous combat buffs you can add.

You, too, will learn to hate Aka Manto

That, if anything, is World of Horror’s one flaw, is its difficulty and random elements. A playthrough can have you quickly screwed over without any way to fix it as the Old God decides to take away your ability to buy items and heal between mysteries quickly, take on too many curses to feasibly complete things, or just end up in combat encounter after combat encounter until eventually you’ve used up your items and the option to run or use your spells will either kill you or advance the doom meter to the point where you won’t win regardless. It’s frustrating sometimes, the way that enemies seem to curbstomp you quickly and the game gleefully shoves you through a gauntlet of terrifying baddies or a bad bounce leaves you scrambling to figure out what to do next. It also presents a cliff that makes it difficult to progress, even the tutorial is one of the most straightforward but grueling levels in the game (“School Scissors, a desperate race to banish the Japanese legend known as the Slit-Mouthed Woman) , pitting you against several tough combats and a terrifying final battle. It’d also be cool if there were more ways to reduce Doom or alleviate Curses, a kind of injury that seems permanent because, as the flavor text says, “modern medicine isn’t useful here.”

But no one said horror manga or cosmic horror stories were happy affairs, and in this at least, it’s accurate. It’s also incredibly satisfying to beat the mysteries and amass yourself a huge variety of allies and weapons, making careful choices and playing smart until you make it to the top of the lighthouse and finally kick over the summoning circle. It allows for both the happiest possible ending and the most depressing, along with everything in between, and that’s actually pretty cool. It also does a great job with generating narrative. The flavor text is a blast to read as you move from location to location, showing the advancement of the mystery as you go, and it’s cool that even turning on the TV in your apartment adds volumes to the story. I’ve played as scalpel-wielding nursing students, occultist transfer students who always seem to end up dead or insane, a swim team captain armed with an interdimensional katana who wiped the floor with an Alexandrian god of fire, and that’s just scratching the surface. Each story feels unique, and as the game’s in early access, I can’t wait to see what they add. Each achievement also adds things to further playthroughs, from new backgrounds that allow for different styles of play (taking more injuries, a lot more cultists coming after you, etc) to new characters, to even more events and abilities. It’s cool to find something you hadn’t before, and there even seems to be a system for unlocking more Elder Gods to fight and a larger bestiary to send against you, deepening each game as you desperately fight against the elder beasts again.

While World of Horror is still in Early Access, what is available is impressive enough that if it keeps up, the full game is going to be a powerhouse. It’s already fully realized, and has enough variety (there’s an entire second “timeline” that shifts the action to Tokyo on top of the other wide range of content) that it’s just as exciting as any other roguelike or horror game on the market. I can’t wait to see what surprises are added to the game, and I hope it’s just as impressive on the full release.

Final score (for now):

The Good:
- Incredibly detailed and gruesome retro-styled graphics and interface
- Wide variety of unlockables and events
- Narrative and theme hang together incredibly well, making for an awesome retro-horror experience
- Addictive gameplay with a lot of hidden depth

The Bad:
- It’s got a difficulty cliff more than a difficulty curve
- Combat can get frustratingly difficult at times
- RNG hates you, but not always in a fun way

"Perhaps It Is Crueler To Let You Live" - Hands-On With Conan Exiles

The following article may contain mature images inappropriate for those under the age of seventeen

It's been almost a week since FunCom released their fantasy sandbox survival sim, Conan Exiles. And the prognosis is...better than initial launch. The game looks great, and the loop of scavenging and survival is well worth it, sure. It's also the only game with (and this is obligatory since it's been the only news coming out about this game other than the lag info,) an endowment slider so you can choose the size of your character's breasts, or, if you are so inclined, pendulous lower extremities. But while the game has a lot of interesting systems and some absolutely gorgeous graphics, the extreme lack of balance, lag and rubberbanding issues, and just downright uncooperative AI mean that this game will have a lot of polish to deliver before its final release.

Conan Exiles casts you into the ancient and brutal world of Hyborea as an Exile, one who has committed terrible crimes (procedurally generated for each new character) and been thrown out into the forgotten wastelands, fastened to a cross to die. The player is then saved by Conan, who leaves them naked and unarmed on foot in the middle of vast ruins hewn from jet-black stone, to gather sticks, rocks, and plant matter until they have enough resources to get themselves clothing and tools. They then must build and upgrade their equipment, gain experience, and eventually rise to assert their dominance over the savage world, provided a crocodile doesn't bite them in half, forcing them to find their body all over again.

Yes, friends, it turns out that not being Conan or one of his allies in a Conan story isn't all that much fun. A lot of the early game is spent running from literally everything, because everything will kill you. Arguably the least dangerous two enemies are the giant bat you meet in a scripted event, and the "imps," nude guys who look like a hunchbacked Toxic Avenger and can't take you out unless in a pack. Even the under-equipped AI-controlled "exiles" who run around on the PVE and single-player instances of the game can take you out. The game is punishing, make no mistake. 

But this highlights one of the major issues with the game. While brutality is all well and good, and is in fact a major feature of the Conan world, the sheer size of the difficulty cliff makes it annoying to play. Enemies will chase you across the map, and even after breaking line of sight. Also, none of them seem the slightest bit interested in anything but you, which means you can be standing on a rock trying to catch your breath and get around things, and suddenly be surrounded by enemies who are only interested in killing you. Moments after leaving the starting desert in any direction, you are swarmed by some fresh horror, which immediately kills you and drops you in the starting desert again.

This necessitates either finding your dead body to loot it in a very dangerous area, or starting all over again from scratch. It's frustrating, but much appreciated over the system where you would lose all your items, weapons, clothing, and any structures as well as everything else, which has since been patched out. However, with the hyper-aggressive enemy AI, this is still a dangerous proposition, and one difficult to enact. You will end up making a lot of stone pickaxes and stone axes to get through the early part of the game, and sometimes it isn't worth it.

Aiding and abetting the enemy AI is a system that doesn't register hits when you attack and some serious lag and rubberbanding issues, leading to such moments as an ibex who will stand still while you hit it, never once registering that it's hurt, only to teleport a mile away and start running like crazy. Enemies will drop you in four hits, regardless of armor or how much damage you deal to them with the same weapon they're using. Sometimes, I even saw people walk across water or through rivers. The lag gets even worse on the online servers, which, I should caution to remind everyone, are the entire point of the game. That you get your open ended Hyborian adventures in a world with real players and real player-created content. Which is nigh-impossible to play.

And all of this really ticks me off, because the game is great. It feels really satisfying when you win a combat and then butcher your kill for parts. It has bizarre moments, like harvesting human adversaries for food and hides, meaning you can be wearing human-crocodile hybrid pants. It's satisfying to gather and make things. It's even cool figuring out the past of the Wastes from the sinister glowing tablets hidden throughout the world, or trying to go to the distant spires you can see from locations. It's a fun game, cloaked in the worst nightmare of hardcore survival game nonsense. It's an awesome concept hampered by extreme performance issues. 

Wait until this one comes out of early access. FunCom is working tirelessly to fix what's broken, and when it finally comes out of early access, the result should hopefully be an intriguing adventure in the brutal world of ancient Hyboria. Until that time, I suggest watching the patch notes intently until the game it is now becomes the game it could be. 

Conan: Exiles is currently in early access. The reviewer received a complimentary copy for this hands-on look