Разработчик: Weather Factory
Описание
На протяжении пятнадцати веков, Дом Затишья был цитаделью знаний - пока не пришел огонь. Коллекция уничтожена, и последний Библиотекарь покинул его. Лишь кто-то, обладающий вашими уникальными талантами, сможет восстановить библиотеку.
BOOK OF HOURS - это элегантная, меланхоличная небоевая RPG, действие которой происходит в оккультной библиотеке, от создателей Fallen London, Sunless Sea и дважды номинированной на премию BAFTA Cultist Simulator.
Предайтесь блаженному покою - расставляйте книги по полкам и обустраивайте свой новый дом, в то же время счищая века истории с каменных стен, окружающих вас.
Влияние Библиотекаря простирается далеко за пределы Дома Затишья. Вам решать, как именно будет написана история.
За 20–40 часов, необходимых для прохождения игры, вам предстоит:
★ ПРИОБРЕТАТЬ, РЕСТАВРИРОВАТЬ и КАТАЛОГИЗИРОВАТЬ оккультные книги, свитки и диковинки.
★ ИЗУЧАТЬ девять Мудростей и покорять девять Элементов Души.
★ НАПРАВЛЯТЬ посетителей, которые приходят за вашей помощью, выбирая их путь и историю.
★ ИССЛЕДОВАТЬ Тайные Истории и пантеон Часов, который ими управляет.
★ ВОССТАНОВИТЬ огромное разрушающееся здание, построенное на фундаменте древнего аббатства.
★ ВЫРВАТЬ свое прошлое из безвестности. Выберите одно из девяти различных Наследий, которые определяют, кем вы являетесь. Вы можете быть Магнатом, отказавшимся от богатства в поисках покоя. Или Археологом, спасающимся от проклятия, которое вы пробудили. А может быть, ваше происхождение более эзотерично, как у Семургиста или Двурожденного? Каждое прохождение игры предлагает разные возможности.
Weather Factory - это команда из двух человек с поддержкой множества талантливых фрилансеров. BOOK OF HOURS была частично профинансирована программой Европейского Союза Creative Europe Programme - MEDIA. Спасибо, Европа! Мы любим тебя. ♥
Поддерживаемые языки: english, russian, simplified chinese
Системные требования
Windows
- ОС: Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
- Процессор: 2GHz or better
- Оперативная память: 2 GB ОЗУ
- Видеокарта: 4GB VRAM, 1600x1024 minimum resolution; integrated graphics cards will only work if post-2012
- DirectX: версии 11
- Место на диске: 5 GB
- Звуковая карта: DirectX 11 compatible
Mac
- ОС: MacOS 12 or later
- Процессор: 2GHz or better
- Оперативная память: 1 GB ОЗУ
- Видеокарта: 4GB VRAM, 1600x1024 minimum resolution; integrated graphics cards will only work if post-2012
- Место на диске: 5 GB
- Звуковая карта: DirectX 11 compatible
Linux
- ОС: Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04 (these are the standard Unity Player requirements; other distros may work; we test on Mint Cinnamon)
- Процессор: 2GHz or better, x64 architecture with SSE2 instruction set support.
- Оперативная память: 1 GB ОЗУ
- Видеокарта: 4GB VRAM, 1600x1024 minimum resolution, OpenGL 3.2+, post-2012 integrated graphics
- Место на диске: 5 GB
Отзывы пользователей
I like this game its atmosphere is perfect and its gameplay is an interesting take on the old cultist simulator. However, there are some things that are a bit obtuse that should be elaborated on.
A very good game, taking and improving the formula of Cultist Simulator.
Very dense narration, very intricate and dense systems that makes for an extremely good experience, given that you like to read a little. Although it does implement some things to smooth your jump into the gameplay, Book of Hours doesn't hold you by the hand, and you will probably spend a lot of time just trying random stuff in order to progress forward in the story. This is not bad in itself (it is the point of the game to experiment), but you can spend several minutes of gameplay repeating the same thing over and over waiting to find something that will make you progress in the story, which is probably according to me the biggest flaw of the game.
The ambiance, whether visual or Sound, is amazing. Since there is no real threat of you dying, contrary to Cultist Simulator, you can really take the time to roam around, discover every little details and texts about the big occult library you are managing. You can reorder things around, decorate rooms as you see fit and classify books. It really gives the feeling that this story is yours and it makes you all the more invested into the game.
In conclusion, so far, I really enjoyed my time being a librarian. Weather Factory are really one of my favourites studios, and if you liked Cultist Simulator, this is an improved version that you should enjoy as well. It also has the same flaw in some capacity, but nothing that will make me not recommend it in any way. But please, give me more ink so I can send my damn orders to glover & glovers !
Book of Hours is one of the most interesting and unique games I've ever played. Every single line of dialogue has charming character, the music is deeply immersive, and every challenge you surpass feels like a real accomplishment. The mysteries you uncover by gradually piecing together the lore of the world and the House are mind boggling and incredibly rich. Truly a 10/10.
It's good at what it does, it just needs an in game notebook to track recipes. In the current build it is almost impossible to play without using excel or google spreadsheets. If it compromises the vision just make the player fill it out them self. You could probably get away just text but could also get fancy with a tagging system and a simple addition function, a journal section and abacus would be about right for flavor
A wonderful game to play for relaxation when you just lost 3 LOL games in a row.
1. All these items are scattered around the place, and when looking for sth there is no searching or filter function. And UI design makes it even more difficult.
2. Memories decay away at dawn and many items are single use. Such fact makes me constantly worried.
So if you have trouble keeping your room tidy, don't play this. I would even say it's ADHD inducing()
1. 物品都散落在场景各处，也没有搜索功能和筛选功能，界面设计更是雪上加霜。
2. 记忆会在黎明消失，很多物品还只能单次使用，这种设定让人时刻处于焦虑状态。
如果桌子都收拾不干净就更别玩这个了，简直是ADHD体验券
If you liked the universe of cultist simulator, this game is very fun and you can play it at your own pace. The second half gets tedious but discovering the lore keeps it interesting
too expensive
This is the first game I've broken out an old fashioned notebook and taken notes on like we were back in the 90s in a very long time. It's a puzzle. It's obtuse. Learning to play is a puzzle in itself. But it's also low-stakes. It's chill. You're organizing books (and the rest of the castle) and slowly uncovering mysteries and lore of the world. As far as I can tell, you're somewhere off the coast of Cornwall in the 1930s, in an altered timeline, but it seems fairly removed from real history save for a handful of mentions of European historical figures. Great game to play when feeling quiet, contemplative, on a misty morning with a cup of coffee or late afternoon tea.
Not the game for you if you don't want to read everything. Probably not your thing if you don't have a fantastic (and I mean top 5%) memory, like writing things down, or don't mind frequently referencing the wiki.
Do you want to play a game that does not feel like a mindless distraction? To have an audiovisual, brain-spine-tingling experience akin to reading your favourite book while the rain patters outside? Then you should pick up this game. You will have to be willing to take your own notes, to enjoy discovering the secrets of the histories, to immerse yourself in the worlds these wonderful devs have built. If this all sounds good to you, then give it a try.
As a fan of Cultist Simulator, I already knew I was in for an esoteric and artistic treat with this game. The sense of 'forbidden knowledge' is just tantalising, and I really love how they've kept with the theme of throwing you into the action with zero tutorial. it might not be to everyone's taste, but I absolutely love this game, and the online community it has who help and inspire.
BOOK OF HOURS contains all the esoteria of Cultist Simulator, in a much more accessible package. Fans of Weather Factory's "dark academia" aesthetic who are more inclined towards "cozy games" than brain-burning puzzles will find much more satisfaction here than in their freshman effort. These developers really know how to immerse you in a world, providing just enough bits and pieces to keep you interested while withholding most of the setting's reality from your view. It's truly a happy medium between FromSoft's item description breadcrumbs and Disco Elysium's breathless infodumping that captures all the mystery of the former along with the detail of the latter.
Figuring out how to use and combine elements to progress is maddeningly addictive. In a lot of ways, BOOK OF HOURS is a crafting game bar none; yet one where what you're crafting is "emotions and impressions" rather than pickaxes and furniture. Hush House seems to be the perfect place to crystallize a thought out of beams of light and spiderwebs using a piano or a telescope; it's the kind of historical amalgam that only an old world mansion can be. Just when you think you've unlocked the perfect room to place your brewed hot tea or cocoa in, you learn how to get a cat and the cozy vibes just skyrocket.
If Cultist Simulator was evocative of madness being a kind of magic, BOOK OF HOURS is a meditation on the arcana of introspection. Every item, every person, every thought has one of several elements to it; kind of like a feng shui that is revealed through a mouseover tooltip rather than an augury-driven journey through the I Ching. Combining these elements and guessing what item will give which becomes intuitive after a while, and experimenting with them to progress your Journal makes you feel like a real alchemist. Combine them into ever more distilled and powerful forms to drive goals that the game refuses to set for you.
BOOK OF HOURS makes me wonder whether my own issues are due to some kind of failure to curate the elements of my own thoughts and impressions of the objects that surround me. Do I really need to know what Knife or Moth actually _is_ to know that I have too much of it in my life? Is there a Journal inside me where these elements are slotting in to lead towards some kind of transcendence? Or are they, like the Journal in my first playthrough attempt, just an unfocused scattering that makes it more difficult for me to progress?
It wouldn't be hard to simply review the mechanics of BOOK OF HOURS the way I do for other games. However, it feels like it would take something away from them to do so. BOOK OF HOURS is a game that provides space and atmosphere for you to think through a million mysteries that the developers have lovingly ensconced within it. However it also provides space for you to bring yourself into it, and hopefully take something out of it too. For example, the thought that changing up your blend of tea or coffee and spending an extra moment looking out the window at a different time of day could lead to a whole new way of seeing the world.
I have played all these guys' games all the way back to Fallen London. Book of Hours (and hours and hours) is in ways both the best AND worst one they've made so far.
Good: Chill, no time pressure like Cultist Sim. So you can read every little snippet, which is required.
Bad: It is definitely required. The game explicitly says so, more than once. Every possible thing in the game has multiple tags and aspects and you need to read pretty much every little note and description, all the time.
Good: It's usually worth the effort. Best vibes/lore/worldbuilding so far imo (shared universe with Cultist), beautiful hand drawn art
Bad bad bad: If you hate to look things up, do not play this. No, for real. I tried to play blind at first; ended up with like 20 tabs of wiki pages. Took over 200 hours to reach ONE ending. I do not think it was worth that kind of time investment.
These guys really need to make their games faster to get through. Not smaller, not shorter... FASTER. But I had a pretty good time nonetheless.
I absolutely love this game! I has spent the last two months playing and loving the world of the game from its secrets to the overall lore. This gameplay style is a first for me, and it has become something I love as you can multitask! and have many eggs in different baskets all at once! As someone who has Cornish family and spent a lot of their childhood and university life in small Cornish fishing villages visiting family, this game resonates with me on a personal level.
I absolutely adore this game.
The world is super rich and I loved slowly piecing together threads of stories every time I opened a new room. Usually I feel the pressure in "cozy" games like stardew to get everything done all at once, but this one really made me feel like I could wander the hush house for hours and feel rewarded for my time even if all I did was put all the knock books on the same shelf and read up on item descriptions.
If you like games that don't rush you, organising books, and learning secrets about a world that is truly stranger under the skin, then I beg you to give Book of Hours a try.
reading is cool
I love this game. I've beaten it three times. I don't know why it's so addicting.
I tried this once and got incredibly frustrated. I came back to it about a year later and have promptly sunk 80+ hours into one playthrough. The difference was, on attempt 2... I made a spreadsheet.
The game gets so much more fun when you treat it like a sort of meditation - especially in the early game, when it seems to actively resist any optimization strategies. Balance that with the lore and the joy of gradually understanding the core gameplay loops, though, and you've got an absolute banger of a game.
But like other reviewers have said, I was one of those kids who got in trouble for reading at the dinner table, and I absolutely get a kick out of updating spreadsheets, so it's definitely aimed at a specific audience.
10/10 would rant at friends about the paucity of low level Moth books again.
This game is so pretty! The writing, the art, the music. It's something you can chill out to without having to turn off your brain. It's one of my personal favorites.
This comes with a caveat, though. Book of Hours won't guide you by the hand with upfront tutorials or convenient task markers. It wants you to approach it with curiosity and an open mind. If you're not into figuring out esoteric writing and having no idea what you're doing well into the late game, then you might want to pass. However, if you DO enjoy truly unique writing and learning, then this might be just the thing you need.
I won't do too deep a dive into the mechanics of Book of Hours, as there are other reviews that have already laid them out in thorough detail, but suffice it to say that it's a rather unique blend of puzzle and exploration with some elements that call for diving into the deep occult lore that underpins both this game and Cultist Simulator. One of the best tips I've seen oft repeated is "read everything" - not just because the lore in this game is rich and deep and worth it, but because there are key passages and hints in various pieces of descriptive text that will help you reach the various endings.
Two of the things I think I most appreciate mechanically about BoH are (1) the fact that you can pick it up for as long as you want - the save mechanic allows you to pop in and out of the world at a whim - and (2) the fact that it is more forgiving than Cultist Simulator in terms of not having menaces that have to be closely managed to prevent a bad end.
In addition to the carefully crafted lore, I also want to give a nod to the visual and audio design. While you can see examples of both in the provided trailer and screenshots, listening to the soundtrack in-game really does set the mood, with the various tracks paired to the game's in-game seasons rather well.
Overall, I enjoy diving into BoH when I want to spend a little (or a lot of) time pretending to be an occult librarian uncovering the secret histories of a sprawling castle-turned-prison-turned-library while having visitors and hosting soirees to delve further into the hidden world of some wonderfully strange immortal powers.
I played this without first having played Cultist Simulator, which seems to be less common. The worldbuilding is enchanting and the writing firmly and deeply scratches the itch for the occult, the esoteric, and the rule-of-threes-bound; the game looks beautiful and for the first half at least the joy of puzzling out its unique mechanics is real. The soundtrack is perhaps a little sparse, but by no means bad, and you can find good additional music easily enough (I suggest "The Wooden Wheel" by Robes of Snow). After about halfway I went back and tried CultSim and yeah there's really no comparison, Book of Hours sweeps the floor. Not just in being more flavourful and immersive, but also in the gameplay and especially the start of the game being enticing. It's great to see how far the devs have come!
The latter half of the game becomes a bit long and repetitive. I kind of wish that, for example, each skill you leveled up "saved" the memories used to do so into itself, so that the focus is on the fun part (figuring out what options you have remaining to get another distinct memory for it) rather than the chore (re-acquiring the same ones over and over). Comfy-games enjoyers might prefer it the way it is, though. The game also seems to want to be replayed to get various "endings" but, ah, hmm, you're gonna need a bit more *ending* to the ending than that, if you catch my drift, I get that we can't all be Spiritfarer but c'mon. That's a lot of re-doing. Having replayability just for the sake of spending more time soaking in the vibes is good, though, can't argue with that.
Overall it's a gem and well worth trying - but also, though the phrase sounds sadder than I mean it, well worth putting down.
So opaque but so crunchy
10/10 would Trist again like we did last summer
I have been looking for a game that scratches this particular itch for years. No other game I've ever played delivers anything like so well on the fantasy of being a powerful wizard exploring arcane secrets. The writing is creepy and delightful; the pacing is slow and relaxed, the difficulty forgiving. It may be my new favorite game ever.
super fun, great art, very replayable
I love this game, like I loved Cultist Simulator (other Weather Factory game) and Fallen London (which one of the devs also worked on).
That being said, this game goes much more slowly than Cultist Simulator. It really helps if you've played Cultist Simulator a fair amount and understand the lore implications and associations of the Aspects. It also helps to have a passing familiarity with the Hours and Histories, and it also helps to have a pen and paper next to you because the middle and later stages of this game involve A LOT of math and memory. There is a reason that you can easily copy/paste all the text into a notes file and that is because you will need to keep some sort of digital or paper record of what you're doing. I am not a game purist so I happily played this with about six different wiki tabs open to remember how to get which memories etc, but if you don't like doing that then you MUST take notes or have a really good memory.
While I love this game, it's definitely not for everyone. It holds your hand even less than Cultist Simulator and it isn't for the faint of heart. But for people who love the slower-paced mystery solving parts of CS (ie, reading all the books, discovering new locations, etc), this may be the game for you.
Also, I might be the only one who took like 80% of a playthrough to figure this out, but rereading books to get memories doesn't require meeting the initial challenge of reading the book! It just needs to go into a desk with a matching aspect and then have ANY element of a soul that can go in that desk plugged in! My midgame took sooooo long because I didn't realise this and was going here, there, and everywhere to try to get memories and wasting skill cards because I couldn't find any. Don't be like me. Reread your books.
The House of Light DLC is definitely worth it as it doubles the game's content and adds so much richness to the visitors and the events in the wider world. I am on another playthrough right now and having a great time!
(Also, if you know the lore implications of various backgrounds, check the wiki to see what elements of the soul you need to pick at the beginning to get your preferred Librarian background/avoid any you might find unsavoury/unsatisfying. For example, I just don't really like Winter and Edge and their associations, so needed to know how to avoid the backgrounds involving them.)
I write this after achieving my first ending/victory in Book of Hours which took 57 hours. If you have played Cultist Simulator before and enjoyed that game but disliked how there was a soft timer attached to a run, you'll probably like this game more as doesn't have a failure state and is a bit more cosy/chill with a similar gameplay loop of CS.
If you havn't played Cultist Sim i would also recommend this game - unless you don't like reading. I think to get the full experience of this game, you should read the 1-3 sentence blurbs attached to most items, books and rooms in the game. That will help set the slight mysticism of the game which is the tasty flavour that runs through all parts of the Library.
Around the mid to late game, you shouldn't feel bad about having the wiki open on the memory page - unless you want to commit to learning how each memory is made.
There is a certain mechanical jank to the game if you scrutinise it (certain items are very hard to create due to the scarcity of clothe for example) but there is always another path/work around you can do.
8/10 would reccomend.
They make interesting games. You can't lose at it. You just have to keep figuring out how things go together and that's the whole game along with organizing clutter. Some time penalties are dumb. Moving beds takes too much time. Restoratives are useless because it takes too much time to use them. These things hurt doubly because a card will go down that you can't fix without the right weather card, then when you get the weather card a card that you needed to fix it goes down, so now you fix the new downed card, restore it, but the two downed cards require two separate beds to fix. None of this will make sense to you unless you've already played the game for context; again, it doesn't actually matter since there's no fail state. It's just a needless obstacle. Besides that there's always one room experiencing a visual glitch. It doesn't affect the playability of the game but it still makes the devs look bad. There's also pornographic money for no reason except to be there.
This is the game that will make you crack down on your ADHD tendencies (otherwise you'll be unable to play it) and start running a notebook to keep track of stuff (just like in those dawn of the ages times when you had to neatly write down all of your GTA and sims cheatcodes in a special journal).
Thematically it follows up on lore established in Cultist Simulator, but it more visually vibrant and detailed. In terms of gameplay it's quite forgiving as whatever you do with your in-game days doesn't wholly depend on RNG's mercy, further in especially, but still requires you to plan quite a bit and usually keep track of multiple things that are going on at the same time. It's definitely still very description-heavy and expects you to use your imagination quite a lot, which is why I personally like it. The way I see this game, it's a great blend of seeing how this could work out as a pen-and-paper game and how it actually works as it is in a virtual environment.
I really enjoy how the lore for this whole obscure, in-the-shadows cultist scene was expanded upon, and that goes on gives off vibes of managing a dollhouse and an advent calendar.
A slow, calm, enigmatic game. Not for the thin of patience, but perfection only exists Nowhere anyway.
Not so much a "library simulator" as a "hidden object" game. You unlock new rooms as you go, each of which is filled with random items, and most rooms only have enough shelf space for about 8 books, so there's really no option to organize anything. You also can't organize your action cards beyond them being automatically divided into four groups by type.
The main gameplay loop is that you take an "unmastered" book with a difficulty around the range of your cards, then you hunt around in your "soul" inventory for a soul card that matches whichever of the 13 aspects the book needs. Then you hunt around in your "skills" inventory for a skill with that aspect. And then you use the arrow keys and mouse zoom to methodically search every room of the huge mansion for a tiny cup of the specific tea or other consumable object that will give you the extra edge to complete the challenge. (Keep in mind that there's no way to filter any of these inventories by aspect. You have to hunt through every single one.)
You can also improve your chances with a "memory" of the right aspect, and the only reliable way to get memories is from specific books, which you have to track via an excel spreadsheet entirely outside of the game (because the game doesn't tell you any of this). So on top of all the other tedious object hunting, you also have to reference your spreadsheet and hunt around for the specific books you need to get the specific memories you need BEFORE you even attempt the challenge. And all of your memories evaporate every day at dawn, so if you've messed up your timing and end up going too late then you have to start all over again.
You can pause the game at any time, so you can take as long as you want tediously scouring your inventories and the mansion for the thing you need. But you have to unpause for anything to actually happen, like reading books or levelling up skills or ordering tea from a catalog, and all that unpaused time brings dawn closer to wipe out all your precious memory cards.
It also feels like half a game -- not in the sense of being "the first half", but rather in the sense of being "the left half", as it frequently presents you with items that it specifically tells you are only useful if you buy the DLC expansion. This aspect comes off as feeling especially sleazy.
One final complaint is that only one patron shows up every season. And the interaction for every single one is identical: you drag their card into "talk" along with the "current event" card, and then you drag any book with a specific aspect onto them, and then they disappear and then you never see that patron again. So if you're expecting part of a "library simulator" to be about having interesting interactions with patrons with evolving stories, this definitely isn't it.
I adore this game. 5 stars. Such great world building, and they have faith in their players to figure things out. The art is beautiful and the humor is subtle & dry. The mood is eerie enough to be unsettling. The mechanics are unique. I don't know that everyone wants to play a game that requires meticulous reading & copious notes (my spreadsheet is currently up to 8 cross-referenced tabs), but I loooooove it. Then again, I am a preservation librarian at a univesity irl, so it feels like I am peak target audience. Can confirm it does an excellent job of re-creating the feel of archival research.
I put about 60 hours into this game before I gave up. I got about, maybe halfway through the rooms, about where room costs are 10 of something, that's when the cons of the game start to outweigh the pros. The main mechanic is cards that you can combine in different ways to access more challenging books or open more difficult rooms. I think it's hard to get started because it tells you so little that it's easy to skip entire parts of the game, which is what happened to me. But once you head to the internet and have someone explain the basics, the game opens up and I thought it was fun while progress was steady.
That said, you have to take detailed notes or refer to the wiki to make any real progress in the game. I rarely crafted anything even though there were many crafting areas, mostly because you have to discover what to craft and there's so much junk lying around, that it isn't really necessary for the most part. If there was something cool to make there, I didn't know what I was missing. Also, you have to understand the game mechanics to even use a crafting station. I did most of the game without upgrading my wisdom, mostly because other than seeing it at the beginning of the game I didn't realize you could do anything with it until another wiki search pointed out the easy to overlook button and I was pretty far into the game before I finally figured it out. I never really understood how to upgrade souls, so I... just didn't. This kind of thing happens a lot in this game.
And this is where the cons of the game lie. The interface is, at times very frustrating, especially on my laptop where I played. Things aren't well explained or gradually introduced. I had no idea what was useful. For a game that's all about reading, it feels like a serious oversight. There's also too much stuff and the game doesn't let you fix it. The lack of in game organization/filter tools (organizing book information, combining lore, or item storage/locations, better card organization, etc, even crafting) or in the rooms themselves can be overlooked when the number of rooms/books is small, and the number of cards is manageable. But there are so many books and rooms and crafting stations that it starts to become overwhelming and it takes an excessive amount of focus to manage it all and since I wasn't actually using all the books or items for anything it started to seem like a lot of work and not a lot of fun. I got tired of taking notes. There, I said it. I don't think you can really play the game without doing them or you'll just be spending your time searching the wiki instead of actually playing the game. Personally, I think the game would have been greatly improved with an in game ledger/memory/book/lore organizer. I was unmotivated to craft memories that would expire moments later, so after crafting a music memory once, I never did it again. I feel like you could probably remove a bunch of the stuff from the game and make it more fun, which is rare for a game. That said, the rooms were unique and interesting and I liked the card mechanics overall.
Anyway, if you like reading and puzzle type games with card mechanics and don't mind playing a game that makes you make a spreadsheet of notes and you can look past the interface issues, give this one a try.
I really wanted to like this game. Sounds entirely cool. I tried repeatedly to get into it, even downloading it repeatedly when I gave up EACH TIME. The simplest things are frustrating, and I don't want to have to maintain spreadsheets or pages of notes. This was made for people with entirely too much time on their hands by people with too much time on their hands. If that's you, go for it. Buy it ON SALE. Do not buy full price.
edit and update: a random comment in a random reddit thread finally opened up the game a lot more for me, which I will share here - Converse with your free assistant multiple times EACH DAY early in that day to obtain free Memories (they vary each time). You do NOT need a Soul card to do that specific thing once you've obtained her help for the day. Those free Memories were very useful in all ways to open up the game. This 100% helped correct a course of action I could not fathom as being true because the panels seems to 'suggest' needing filled. Still buy it on sale though.
A sleepier, cozier game from the creator of Cultist Simulator. Book of Hours sees you take on the role of an occult librarian restoring the empty shell of Hush House. I was quickly hooked by the intricate setting and weird history that I first saw in CS. This is a very different experience, one that felt like it built on the world and atmosphere of the first game.
Pros:
- gorgeous art
- simple but compelling soundtrack
- open to different styles of play
- multiple endings
- fantastic and strange world you learn about through the strange books in the library
Cons:
- can get repetitive after a while
- some endings rely on random events (I had to basically sit and "fast forward" almost a year to win the game on my latest playthrough
- books are intriguing but kind of blur together eventually
Overall, this is a strangely meditative and engrossing game. If you liked the world of Cultist Simulator but are looking for a more relaxed experience, try Book of Hours.
Tedious. Wait for the right sequence of random events to fire and combine them. Then wait for the combinations to finish.
The game invites you to explore options, then can punish you if you do so. Anything from rare missed opportunities to shutting down your play options.
Also the recipes are hidden, obtuse, make no sense to me. You can make fluids with a telescope.
I want to make it clear that I did not like this game. I found it too esoteric, and too slow to be any fun. But I don't think I am this games intended audience. If you think this game is up your alley, then buy it, just expect some initial frustrations. If you are on the fence, get it while it is on sale. While I haven't played cultist sim myself, the game essentially seems like a more forgiving version based on what I have heard others say.
Tl;DR buy this game if you're ok with no tutorial or explanation in game
I don't understand the game really, its very cryptic, i keep playing it though...
The first 15 minutes of the game were enough to let me know that this game was going to be a masterpiece. I've played and deeply enjoyed Cultist Simulator, and was hoping for a similar experience; however, with this game I got something different, yet even more intriguing than the previous installment. I would say that this game is a lot more forgiving, but also more obscure than Cultist Simulator. It benefits from prior knowledge of the aforementioned game, yet doesn't require it. If you enjoy occultism, esotericism, mystery, lore-rich media and a dash of Lovecraftian horror, this game is for you!
maybe I just Didn't F****ing Get It but it became incredibly un-fun once I was able to cross the bridge to the actual building we've all been waiting for. It just takes so much to start unlocking and using it? Am I just wasting all my turns and days? Although I am interested in unlocking the various memories of which you must discard some and only discover a fraction...
This game is a deliberate time sink, masquerading as a puzzle. 'Get these resources in this combination to open this thing. Oh, and we're not going to tell you how. Congratulations, now do it again, but slightly differently. And again. And again. And again.' The 'lore' sprinkled through gives an illusion of exploration, but there's really nothing behind it. It doesn't matter. A fun metaphor for most occult studies, actually. Maybe this is just a clever piece of performance art. Still can't recommend it as a game, though.
There is no guidance at all whatsoever.
I'm sure this game has its merits, but I wouldn't be able to enjoy it am I?? Because I have no idea what I should do or even start the game. I spent at least half an hour before unlocking the village, wondering what I should click and how I should proceed. Turned out I need to un-pause the time, and drag some random card to the book thingy, and I'm lost after that again.
Bought it today with 40% off, so I can accept this mistake of mine. But for anyone who is still hesitating, DON'T BUY IT!
Book of Hours is an exploration puzzle game about uncovering eldritch truth while sitting in a comfy chair by the fireplace. It is a relaxed version of Cultist Simulator, in which you don't have to be afraid of dying every 5 minutes and you actually keep the books you read. In fact, changes from CS to BoH is similar to how Sunless Sea transitioned to Sunless Sky. The game has way less RNG and grind than before, richer visually and gives more freedom to do what you want. It is still about managing timers and cooldowns, but there're a lot more sure ways to get the stuff you need. Closer to the endgame it may seem that your progression is throttled by RNG, but actually it is a mind trap created by relying on familiar methods.
Now, the large portion of actually playing Book of Hours is figuring out what you can do and how, so telling about it in the review would defeat the whole point. This is why the review below may look like baby's first SCP article.
Basic Concepts
Every item in the game has stats and qualities assigned to them, allowing them to be used in certain context. Your soul cards represent both your stats, action points and what kind of approach you take when interacting with objects.
On a basic level you interact with things through actions like "consider" and "speak". You can't speak to a book, but you can speak to someone about the book. Later you can find a variety of workstations that can be used in place of actions with greater efficiency at the cost of adding limitations. A surgeon's table isn't exactly a place to read a book, but can be used to dissect something. Musical instruments can create music, kitchen is a good place for cooking, etc.
Reading Books
You play as a newly appointed Librarian of the Hush House, an ancient repository of secret knowledge. Naturally, it is your job to know what all of the books in your possession are about. Reading books also allows you to do stuff described in them.
Each book has a stat requirement that you need to match to understand its mystery. You do so by using your soul cards that match the stat. Successfully understanding the mystery rewards you with a memory, a fleeting crafting material that expires after a day. You can read the same book again to recall that memory. You also receive a lesson, a special kind of memory that you can keep for a long time, but can't recover on a second read. Lessons unlock and upgrade skills that can be used later for a variety of things.
Some books also have additional qualities, like languages and curses. Librarian already knows languages like Latin and Greek, but some need to be learned from visitors. You don't have to remove a curse in order to read the book, but it is a good idea to do so.
Personally, i would also recommend keeping notes about the stuff you read and what you get from each book. The game allows you to copy the text in any window by simply clicking it, so you could paste it somewhere else.
Restoring the House
The Hush House was abandoned for a long time. It is your job to restore it, which will take a bit more effort than just changing a few planks and repainting the walls. The Hush House was a lot of things in the past, not just a library for occult books. So restoring it is more like restoring an old SCP site, except you don't personally fight the monsters. To deal with all of the living mists, whispering shadows, sentient rays of light and other things you need assistance from nearby town.
Like with books, each room requires you to match at least one stat needed to restore it. Whatever unfortunate soul you brought into the House has basic stats that you can enhance by talking to them. Use your soul to collaborate, complain about the weather or something you've read in the book, feed them, get them drunk, give them "instruments", and then send the poor fools to fight stains of screaming paint in the attic. After they are done, you permanently unlock the new room.
As i mentioned before, restoring rooms deeper into the House becomes more challenging and requires higher stats to do each time. The town has a few permanent residents with low stats and a few more that come and go with seasons. Getting assistants with highest stats is tied to RNG. Additionally, the best memory you can get in early and mid game is also tied to RNG and the season. This means that unlocking rooms will require you to have:
- the right RNG based season and weather;
- the right RNG based assistant;
- the right soul card available;
- the right instrument;
[*]the right drinks and food.
All just to have a chance to unlock a SINGLE room. This was greatly improved after launch and with DLC, but it is still very easy to feel throttled by RNG. This issue is also compounded by how you increase your stats.
Enriching the Soul
Learning skills from books allows you to interact with the Tree of Wisdom. Assigning a learned skill to one of its branches gives you an additional soul card, depending on the discipline you chose and the skill. With more soul cards you can do more stuff per day. Later you can also evolve cards, trading quantity of cards for quality.
Unfortunately, Tree of Wisdom is another pitfall that newer players fall into. See, evolving cards requires special workstations that only accept cards with certain stats. Which means that if you assigned a skill to a soul card that cannot be put together into a workstation, you've left yourself at a noticable disadvantage. It is not the end of the game, but it cannot be undone until a new run is started.
Crafting
Learning and upgrading skills and increasing your stats isn't just for reading. Many rooms in the House have special workstations that can be used to create stuff to help you with your duties. Each skill has a few recipes that require certain stats and materials. Knowledge of herbs allows you to make simple healing balms, ink brewing is used for mixing paints and inks. Higher recipes for metallurgy allow you to turn common metals into magic metals. Fleeting memories are transformed into stronger persistent memories, both of which can then be used for other things.
Remember how you had to wait for the right weather to unlock a new room? Now you can just "recall" a forbidden secret and share it with your assistant. A crappy +1 to a stat from a saw? How about a creepy doll that gives +6? Have you tried my homebrew yet? It is made with wet dreams i've got from a 19th century erotic poem.
Visitors and Affairs
Being a Librarian isn't just about reading books yourself. It is also about lending books to people who actually need them. Sometimes something unusual will happen in the world and people will come to you for help.
Periodically the game will draw a random Affair, an event happening in the greater world. Certain visitors associated with that Affair will come to you seeking knowledge. Giving them books with the right stats will reward you with special currency of the occult society, which you can use to receive favour from other visitors, like learning a new language. While visitors can teach you a new language, you can't actually teach them. If you don't have the right book on hand, you can offer visitors to stay, provided that you have the right bed. When the Affair is finished, it is added to the Tree of Wisdom, where you can decide the outcome by inviting the right visitors again, earning additional rewards.
And i ran into the limit. There're a lot of things i didn't mention, like endings and the DLC stuff, but what is here should be enough.
It's a quiet and contemplative sort of game, and make no mistake you will be expected to take notes, write things down, and make your own indexing scheme. If the sort of gameplay where some occult investigator shows up asking about a mysterious entity in a sewer and you then go puttering off to your bookshelves, muttering to yourself "now where did I put that copy of Exorcism for Girls" appeals to you, this will be your sort of game.
That being said, it requires time, and during that time not much happens. If you are seeking significant story or complex mechanics, that won't happen here - there's a little puzzle-crafting where you need to figure out which ingredients make fit the recipes and work stations available, and there's a few mysteries to uncover as you slowly unlock the house, but it's all pretty stately and measured and considered. This is a game of planning, organisation, and careful investigation. It can probably be shortcut and also ruined with use of an external wiki.
It has absolutely lovely music and evocative sound, and interesting and detailed 2d graphics, though you may wish to confirm you like the style.
I like it.
I love the music, the relaxing gameplay, and the sense of exploration of a parallel reality. The artwork, style, bit of intrigue, and even the challenge of figuring out the mechanics for moving forward or getting out of a malady keeps the game open for days on end!
Very similar to cultist simulator: a grand game, very experimental, but gets a bit tedious by the end and that really hurts it. Has a lot of cool secret stuff and yet I ended up feeling there should have been more. Definitely better than cultist simulator was, but there's still a lot of room for improvement in both UI and gameplay.
In its essence this is a crafting game with obscure gameplay (it's supposed to be this way) and even more obscure lore (it's supposed to be this way). Requires a lot of time, reading and excel spreadheets to play comfortably. Has the most obscure and convoluted lore I've yet seen in a videogame, even compared to author's previous works on Fallen London. If that sounds intriguing, I recommend at least trying it out.
10/10
Weather factory makes games that scratch a very particular itch, and scratches it well.
If you have an interest in medieval occultism/ alchemy/ esoteric studies, this game is the modern Magnum Opus. May the blessings of the Watchman enlighten your being, the cup of the Sister and Witch overfloweth.
Cultist simulator kinda dog water but addicting, this one like good good
I was nervous getting into this because I thought it might be really hard but the difficulty is really refreshing. I never played cultist sim but this is really good for someone coming in with no idea. I have had a lot of fun playing this game!!!
Gave it an honest go but... it's a cooldown management simulator with some lore you gotta piece together. The gameplay is primary managing the said cooldowns and a very clunky inventory (the entire map is your inventory).
Works fine on a steam deck but some text doesn't scale and playing with a touch pad is not super convenient.
Confusing but in a good way. The system is complex but can be untangled at your own pace as you test, fail, and master various skills and tools.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Weather Factory |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac, Linux |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 25.02.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 91% положительных (2237) |