BOOK OF HOURS

This is very hard to review. I'll just describe the game so you can make up your mind if it's your cup of tea. The entirety of the gameplay consists of unlocking things. Each thing you unlock has numbers on it that you can then use to unlock more things. That's it. There is no other gameplay than this. Why is that interesting? Two main reasons... First, it's obviously a labor of love and definitely NOT lazy, unlike most other games composed entirely of unlocks. The writing is center stage in this game and (despite lackluster music and visuals) it manages to create a consistently interesting world with a mysterious ambiance. The writing is your reward for making progress. Second, unlocking things is difficult in a strange way. It's not about puzzle solving, because (appropriate to the literary theme) everything is totally unstructured. There are no patterns to find. It's up to you to figure out how to progress... maybe you have a photographic memory, or you like taking lots of notes, or you don't mind using the wiki (honestly you will need to - see below), or you like hunting around and trying lots of combinations until you find something that works. I found this strangely engaging, against my expectations. There is one major negative point to be aware of... This game has one of the worst UIs I've ever seen in a game. It really is a huge pain to use, has lots of bugs and annoying rough edges and creates lots of busywork (perhaps busywork was assumed to be part of the appeal?). This is compounded by the fact that the intended usage of the UI is totally unobvious and rather complicated - and it is not explained by the game at all!! I had to consult the wiki to progress past both the first and second screens in the game, entirely because the game did not explain how to use its UI. Leaving it to the player to discover and 'figure out' some stuff in the game makes sense (it augments the feeling of overwhelming and disorienting cosmic mystery that permeates the writing), but not telling them the necessary facts of how to use the UI makes ZERO sense. If you're stuck, you are probably just missing some information about how to use the UI, so go look it up on the wiki or Reddit. There's not that much you need to know in total, so this should not happen too many times.