Before you post about the game please consider spoilers very carefully! Games of this ilk are all about the thrill of discovery and the smug satisfaction of figuring it out yourself.
In Book of Hours, you take on the role of a Librarian in charge of a huge occult library. But it's not all cobwebs and fine print: you'll need to carefully rebuild the library room by room, re-discovering its secrets, treasures and dangers. The Hush House has a long history and not all of it is pleasant.
I'm going to talk about the game in two ways: one for the uninitiated who haven't played its predecessor, Cultist Simulator. And another for the Knows.
For Neophytes:Book of Hours is a chillaxed real-time point and click narrative-based game. It's part life-sim, part puzzle game and 94.3% reading. While it does have some rather charming graphics and plays in real-time with a pause button, the meat of the game is all text, prose and fact-finding. Its themes are heavily based in the occult, even down to how the game presents information to you. While Books of Hours does a better job explaining HOW to do things to you than its predecessor, the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and perhaps most insidiously, the WHY are left to you to figure out. Information is presented largely out of context and it's up to the player to take it all in and synthesize an understanding out of it. For those with a scholarly bent and a knack for lateral thinking Book of Hours is cornucopia of stories, history, inference, supposition, intuition, experimentation, revelation and discovery.
The format of the game sees you omnisciently looking down on a map of the Hush House and the attached small village. Cards represent things like objects, attributes, skills and ideas. Put the right combination of cards in slots that represent activities, and things happen. This might be visiting someone, talking to someone, examining a thing or interacting with something. These "verbs" structure all of game play and wrapping your head around the idea can take a little getting used to. But game does a good job of telegraphing what your options are.
The lore of Book of Hours is what ultimately makes the game. There are several layers to it, from the world game takes place in to the history of Hush House and the village of Brancrag to the very nature of reality itself. The history of all three is a rich tapestry of ideas and stories that draw from every game the developer has made in the past. It IS overwhelming coming to it for the first time trying to piece together the world and its meaning, and therein lies the joy of gameplay. It asks you to build a 10,000 jigsaw puzzle of knowing without knowing what the final picture looks like.
Book of Hours mimics a life sim in that there's a seasonal day/night cycle and gameplay is a series of actions you're performing that take a certain amount of time to complete. So you'll often be juggling several activities on timers at once: cataloging a book here while talking to a cat there, while doing odd jobs around town and searching the countryside. All can be going concurrently as long as you have the physical and mental attributes to perform the activities. Once you use an attribute card it's exhausted and refreshes at dawn of the next day, or by a few other methods. It sounds like keeping multiple spinning plates in the air at once, and it kind of is. However the pause button lets you stop and take the time you ABSOLUTELY NEED to read all the things, figure out how to maximize your efficiency. And unlike its predecessor, there is no punishing upkeep you have to maintain. The game doesn't pressure you to do anything.
The most salient goal of gameplay is restoring Hush House to its former glory. You'll restore each room with help from the villagers and others, strategizing how best to use them and your available resources and talents to delve deeper into Hush House. Along the way you'll meet your charges: books. First you'll need to catalog them to know what they are. From there it's up to you what you decide to do. Once you've gotten settled in, visitors will start arriving to Hush House every season to seek out knowledge. The more of the collection you've cataloged, the better their chances of success. Of course you could also and SHOULD also READ the books yourself, for therein lies the truth. Accruing the knowledge and potential to do so however requires building on lower tiers of understanding, and a touch of chance. Hush House is also packed with objects to move around, craft things or simply decorate. What good is a Library if the Librarian can't organize their books, after all?
As you learn more lore through reading you'll gain skills which you can use to further your activities in Hush House, and allow you to work your way higher into the Tree of Knowledge. Once begin to understand all the layers and branches of the Tree of Knowledge, you're on your way to becoming a Know.
It's nice to be back.
For a Know of Cultist Stimulator the biggest question about Book of Hours is: is it a ball-breaker permadeath game too?
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is that while it is still a time-management game, unlike Cultist Simulator, it's not dragging out gameplay with guaranteed setbacks you have to constantly account for. No more seasons of illness. No more Suppression Bureau or Hunters or Stupid Cops constantly dogging your every activity, forcing you to wait for them to go away before you can do something else. There's largely only forward momentum in Book of Hours rather than forced downtime or constant upkeep interrupting progress. You're not as subject to RNG as you were in CS. While that does mean the game lacks some of the constant pressure, it also feels fairer, more relaxed and less frenetic to play. It's just a more chill experience overall.
It's also the culmination of the world Alexis has been building for the last 4 games. It's got references going back to Sunless Sea, which means somewhere in Book of Hours' DNA is Fallen London too.
They've taken the concept of aspects from CS and doubled down on it. Where before there were just three "core" attributes, now there are 8. Or 9, depending on who you ask. The elements of a person are now more broadly described across more attributes. There's also a few new aspects to bolster the lineup from the last game. In addition to Heart, Grail, Forge and all the ones you know, there's now Moon. Scale. Rose. On top of THAT, a layer of disciplines have been added as well. Broadly constructed schools of utilizing the elements of the soul to do different things.
In CS, you were limited by your attributes becoming exhausted doing stuff and it's the same in Book of Hours. But instead of your attributes all having independent timers to refresh, now everything refreshes at the dawn of a new day. At the start, your attributes and the fact you only have one "Consider" verb slot to work with, meters out the day. When you're out of attributes to do stuff, you kill time moving stuff around like organizing your books or grouping together like items. It creates this nice sense of filling hours of the day doing stuff. As you earn more attributes you essentially gain more output per day to an extent.
Book of Hours took the concepts of "Rituals" and "Skills" and "Lore" and kind of smushed them all together in BoH. So as you acquire knowledge you learn skills that represent both your lore and specific verbs that let you interact with various crafting stations to create various things. As you learn more Skills they can be upgraded, and then slotted into the Tree of Wisdom, which grants you more attributes, which you can improve, which lets you read more challenging texts, which nets you more Skills, etc and so forth into ad absurdem.
Because Book of Hours has a crafting system, that means there's a shit load of stuff beyond books. Hush House is littered with plants, raw materials, furniture, statues, paintings, devices and tools, all of which you use to craft everything from booze to potions to art and beyond. It's a lot to take in all at once and the system for placing objects in the house is kinda wonky. But the house is FUCKING YUGE and each room has shelving, floor and table space for placing objects. What I didn't expect in Book of Hours that delights me is all the decorative stuff to play with.
Former Adepts will recognize and appreciate all the CS callbacks. From mentions of the Mansus to authors from the previous game(s) to CS music remixed and used in Book of Hours, it really does feel like a sequel. I feel so much better equipped to understand Book of Hours having played CS. I really enjoy the continuity.
But I also enjoy what's new. In addition to learning or re-learning about the CS/BoH world, there's history to Hush House itself which is more grounded. Each room describes a little a little bit about who built it and maybe why, and it's really neat getting drip fed history that ISN'T incredibly esoteric or incomprehensible.
The writing is still pretty on point as well. I feel like maybe CS's ideas were slightly more impactful since it was trying to describe less, so the prose was a little tighter. But overall I have few complaints.
In terms of UI Book of Hours has come a decent ways since CS. The little card holders can be slide around or insta organized or opened to full with a click of a button. Hush House being so densely cluttered with stuff can make it tricky to say, place books on a shelf when there's another object in front of it. And the alignment of some stuff is a little wonky. But it hasn't crashed on me or locked up yet, so as far as bugs and stability it's doing pretty well.
Overall I think Book of Hours is an "easier" game than CS. I haven't come close to finishing it so I don't know nearly enough about it. But my impression is there's fewer hard road blocks to progress. In that sense it's a slightly grindier game I think but one that's largely free of interruption or padding due to RNG. Unlike CS, it's cozy to play while still being intriguing. I'm sure there's some BS down the line yet. Alexis is still Alexis. Every Know remembers what it took to become one, and I think that's going to eventually be true in BoH as well at some point. If true, the difference is going to be: instead of looking for a needle in haystack you'll be looking for a needle in hay field.
One unanticipated "benefit" of playing Book of Hours is that I now, whether I want to or not, understand how British currency works.
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Topic: Book of Hours. Be an Occult Librarian, hoard forbidden knowledge, try not to die (Read 6972 times)