I've essentially finished the game.
Sort of. But not really.
Overall, I have enjoyed Book of Hours. It easily became an 80 to 100 hour game, just taking my time, trying things out, overthinking things, reading. The writing is as good as ever, the world of Cultist Simulator gets more brush strokes added to it, the music is good, the graphics are quaint and charming. All in all probably their best game yet.
I have some some gripes though.
1. Itemization feels under baked. I haven't yet gone to a wiki and spoiled myself, but I really feel like for all the "things" BoH has in it, there's passingly little you can do with it. There are dozens and dozens of low level items that clutter up Hush House, meant to be used, but their utility is limited. And it's like they ran out of time or interest to make more interactions and recipes, because there's hints and implications all over the place.
Like more than one set of vegetable items saying "ready for stew." Can you make stew in Book of Hours? NO! I found a grand total of 1 craftable persistent tool. Am I possibly missing some combination of skill workstation? Maybe? But I can't be assed making a spreadsheet to keep track of combinations I've tried.
It honestly feels like Cultist Simulator had more things at more levels you could actually make use of.
BoH basically says "each mystery has 2 to 3 Prentice level options, 1 to 2 Keeper options and 0 to 1 Scholar options. Then there are some special exceptions, like using a memory to create a stronger memory, or very specific combinations at workstations.
Which leads me to my second gripe.
2. Trying things out quickly becomes tiresome when you get the same results out of 90% of stuff. There's so many different kinds of work benches and potential combinations to try, but so often you are not rewarded for the effort. This was sort of true in Cultist Simulator too but at least there's things you could do with the stuff you made.
In BoH if it's not an ink or a tool, it's used for unlocking the House or making something that makes an ink or a tool (or, I suppose, restoring an exhausted element of the soul.) The game IMPLIES you should be able to paint pictures, make food, sculpt stone, forge things, weave different kinds of fabric.....and you really can't in most cases. As far as I can tell, the Loom exists solely to weave one piece of Fabric with some Heart baked in that you can give to the Coffinmaker's wife to help her unlock rooms. That's it!
It's like the game has the appearance of more variety than CS while coming down to pretty much the same thing.
3. There is a lot of filler when it comes to Hush House, and the investment --> reward structure is off. Some people might say "well the narrative is the true reward" but there is a mechanical side to the game that BoH is clearly about, but does really unevenly.
The latter half of the House, I.e. the end game, is filled with rooms that a) have very little in them you haven't seen b) just have an upgrade shrine or c) have nothing at all. I was really disappointed in the gaol and caves because for how much space there is and how much effort it took to unlock that stuff, there's fuck all in there except for the two vaults! And those don't give you cool tools or resources you haven't seen. They have random chests with random stuff, up to and including Great Inks. I think I found almost all the ones I have now, before I even crafted them. Also, thanks for filling the holiest of holies with trash that you've been fishing out of the sea for the last 80 hours. Really appreciate that effort.
The narrative flourish of the latter rooms is good but as a gamer I want an actual reward that feels tangible to go along with it. It's like everything cool is loaded at the midline of the House because, I suspect, that's where they thought most people would stop playing. Because.....
4. Game progression is wonky when it comes to your "character" too. It is inherently random based on what books you get what you'll be strong at initially. But even then there are these weird design choices that stymie your progress. It's hard to talk about this one in depth without going into spoilers.
The fact that Skills have Disciplines which bind to Elements of the Soul, and you need the right workstation with the right combination to upgrade them is kind of stupid. There are 100% combinations that do not have a corresponding workstation to upgrade them at. That is not a gameplay feature, that is sloppiness and a lack of followthrough. It's not so bad you can softlock your game doing it, but it's pretty frustrating to play the entire game waiting for a chance to pursue an upgrade only to find out, oops, haha, guess you shouldn't have slotted that thing that I let you slot!"
I didn't even get to upgrade Shapt once until I was 80 hours in, no joke. If you wanted to focus on Bosk, well, prepare to have to unlock 75% of the House before you can do anything with it. It's all particularly galling because you make these choices initially having almost no idea what it really means in the context of "when am I going to find the thing this works with." That's just a bad design. The fixed, chronological nature of Hush House is at odds with random acquisition of skills and the unpredictable paths for upgrading the stats they grant you.
5. It doesn't finish strong. Cultist Simulator didn't either if I'm honest. But Book of Hours I think knew that many people didn't have the patience to finish Cultist Simulator so they made a lot of offramps to "finish early." The note at the game launch is a direct message to hardcore fans that they're in for a grind if they want the "True" ending. But it's not punishing or challenging. It's random and tedious. And again, frustrating, because of design decisions that were made.
So I got Cartographer as my journal-type. Got the ink. Finally got a Numen that said it was the special win for Cartographer. But it didn't have Rose on which I thought I was interesting. So I figured I'd keep playing, read more books, find another Numen and see if there were multiple Cartographer endings. Except I didn't realize, and the game doesn't tell you....you can only have one Numen at a time. So I read a new book, got a new Numen that I wasn't interested in, and it wiped out the Numen I'd planned to use. The only other Numen book I'm fairly sure the Determination I want is in....is locked behind a language where I'm fairly certain I've NEVER seen the visitor that teaches it.
So now I'm in the position of just finishing with whatever Determination I have on hand in disgust, or grinding out unknown numbers of hours before the language I need shows up, and wrestling the Tree of Wisdom to get the Elements of the Soul I need upgraded along with a high enough level Skill for the Aspect I'm going to need to target and do all this before the next Numa wipes out everything I'm sitting on......oy vey. I just don't know if I care anymore. Now that I've explored the House the flow of new book is reduced to a trickle and I will eventually run out of things to do other than just watch time pass.
To be honest I was done with Book of Hours 30 hours ago already. But I really wanted to push for the big finish. Total completion of the House and penning the specific Determination I was targeting. But BoH kind of let me down on both of those fronts. The House exploration wasn't paid off as much as I'd like, and the entire process of discovery, progression and ending completion is riddled with tedious trial and error "with exceptions" obfuscation and obligatory grinding with RNG, semi-broken systems and self-inflicted wounds due to knowledge not present or not given.
I feel like they took the "you're gonna fail at Cultist Simulator at least once" mentality and changed it to "your first run of Book of Hours isn't going to end the way you wanted it to" because you're making decisions about things you don't yet understand. It's flexible enough and gives you enough off ramps to finish some kind of way, so in a sense these are minor to average gripes. But I started to get the feeling in the latter half of the game that my time wasn't being respected. The best part of the game is front loaded but all the possibilities it promises kind of fail to meaningfully materialize by the game's end. I felt that way about Cultist Simulator too....but to a lesser extent than I do in Book of Hours. Since it's a bigger game with more "stuff" it has more room to not live up to its potential.
If I had to pick one thing out of this list that got me the most, it's the crafting. There's just so much it seems like you should be able to do, and discover, but either it's not there, which makes your time experimenting feel like it's wasted, or it's so ultra specific and secret and you're like "how many hours do you expect me to swap cards around in slots to do something cool." Like I just found out reading the Steam forums that:
There's specific shrines that if you use a specific skill at them you'll get a Treasure of the House. There's esoteric hints that some people were able to track down to lead you to them. These are more secret than the Rowenium where you literally have a symbol telling you to put a thing in a box to get a Treasure of the House. And it's just not a fun process to go "Ok, let me try every Lantern Skill at 5, every Lantern Skill at 10, every Lantern Skill at 15, juggle the reagents you need to hit the numbers, check specific reagent combinations, and then do that for every aspect at the workstation." I just wanted to make some fucking stew!
I literally started using Steam's in-game notes feature because I was having that hard of a time keeping track of things. Half of my time in this game was spent navel gazing wondering "did I try this thing here at this level already? Did I go through every ingredient in that slot to see if something special or unusual happened? WTF did I make this memory for 20 minutes ago when I was thinking about something completely different." The dialogs in the crafting boxes usually tell you what your options are but some you don't know until you get 90% or 100% of the way toward a successful combination.
After this many hours with the game, I'm looking forward to play something else and I dunno, shooting something with a gun.
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Topic: Book of Hours. Be an Occult Librarian, hoard forbidden knowledge, try not to die (Read 6971 times)