BOOK OF HOURS

WTF?

I am not beating the "girl who plays games where all you do is read books" allegations.

It's a forgiving cultist simulator with more presentation. I like the physical nature of the books, it makes it feel more like a collection than your interchangeable lore pieces from CS. Rituals are replaced by crafting, which is more complex, has more recipes, and generally harder to figure out. I find there's a lot more aspect matching than is CS, which makes certain actions feel more finicky than they should be. In CS to perform a rite you only needed sufficient amounts of three aspects, it was pretty easy to find which aspect combinations would do things, and once you get ingredients and tools or find out how to get influences it wasn't too hard to perform rituals. In BoH I sometimes feel like I'd finally found the recipe for something only to discover I was missing one aspect, and even if I got the ingredients I needed it turns out I didn't have a workstation yet so I couldn't do it anyway. You will need a spreadsheet for this game. This crafting problem is far from a deal breaker, but it's the most significant negative for me so far which is why I focused on it. It does get easier as you play, but it feels like the big learning curve for BoH is in the midgame instead of the early game like CS so you might expect to feel like you're slowing down even after you feel like you've got it already. It also seems like a playthrough will take much longer than one in CS. Progress is assured in BoH because there aren't really failure states, but it's balanced by progress being slower.

you haven't played this game until you see numa

可能有另一个我过着在布兰库格养龟养蛇养海鸥，看天气读书，闰识抢收作物，每个季节下厨做点仰望星空派和伊苏墙的生活。 ----------------------------------------------- 文学性方面：夯 游戏性方面：多周目能忍住不开控制台的人真无敌了（褒义

The Book of Hours does some fun thing with progression -- the more you know, the further you are in the game. Most of its elements are right under your nose from the beginning, but to actually use it, or even notice it, you have to go through a process of research and discovery. Very tiny details hint you in the right direction, but the scrutiny and the fun of making connections and gaining insights are all yours. The game reminds me of a mystery box. You fiddle with it, experiment with it, try stuff, mine for knowledge and keys, and it rewards you with a new puzzle and brings the very special type of joy -- joy of discovery. If you are generally a curious person -- this game might scratch the right itch. Cultist Simulator could've done the same job, but time pressure and the game's unforgiving nature killed the vibe for me, when the Book of Hours eliminates that not-fun part, so you can focus on working out its mechanics and gathering the lore without gambling part and risk of flushing your progress down the sink because of unlucky RNG(even though they share the meta-progression mechanic). Peculiar thing -- the game made me make a spreadsheet, and I actually enjoyed it. Gathering key information and categorising it in my own manner helped me to immerse in librarian skin very well. Additional flavour for immersion comes with atmosphere of secret societies, forbidden knowledge, reticency and mystery(and speaking of that -- Alexis Kennedy knows the ball!). Art, music and especially writing -- everything works great. The story revolves around a library(to be recovered) on the Cornish oceanside, full of occult mysterious knowledge from the dust of ages and insights of passionate minds, and you are here to shed some light on it and eventually -- ascend with one of the arcane arts(or something else?). I didn't finish the game yet, but from what I've learned so far, replayability is very decent -- you cannot gather everything in one playthrough, but all the knowledge you dug up persists(in my case in the form of a spreadsheet), so you may focus on exploring the new stuff. Likely I'll be back to revise this after 100 hours, but my love for the game won't ever perish.

The "Secret Histories" games are an acquired taste, but if you like games with complex mythology and occult themes then this is as close as you will ever get to an occult library simulator.