Impressions – Book of Hours

An impressions article! We’ve not had one in a while, primarily due to a lack of games I particularly wanted to discuss. Both positively and negatively. But here we are now with Book of Hours, and I can just give you my impressions of it right here: great game, can’t recommend it. But if you want to know why I say this, please read on.

Note: I am aware that the game’s developers are trying to fix some of the issues I’ve described in this article or, at the very least, alleviate them to some degree. Hopefully, this means the game will improve with time, but we’ll see.

(Please note that I’ll only use press kit images here.)

So, a bit of context on the game. In essence, this is Cultist Simulator 2, but it does a lot to try and address a lot of the issues with the previous game. It’s not exactly like CS, but it’s also very much not unlike CS and that goes both for the strengths and the issues present in both games. It also takes place in the same setting, which at some point gained the moniker of “Secret Histories” and is, technically speaking, the third game in set therein. However, The Lady Afterwards is not a computer game, and it’s honestly more of an interactive art collection.

1) Librarian Simulator

So, what even is Book of Hours?

That is a difficult question to answer concisely, but I’ll try to, at the very least, try to answer it coherently. And the first thing we should establish is that it’s a life simulator game, although one making heavy use of abstract, symbolic, allegorical, and referential elements for its presentation. While there is a lot of explicitly stated material you will interact with, you will have to fill in some of the blanks to make total narrative sense of what you are doing. And I think that’s fine. The game presents a strong enough case through its presentation and tone that I’ve not had any issues doing so.

It’s also a role-playing game, both in the sense of having those so-called “RPG elements” (an inventory, character attributes, skills, character progression mechanics), even if they don’t look like you usually expect them to look. But more importantly, it’s a true RPG in the sense of how you use those mechanics to express a character you have in mind.

It is also a card game, but not in the sense you expect those to play when you hear that term. Book of Hours is what we call a tableau game. Unlike most card games you might be familiar with, here you do not focus on decks, drawing cards from decks or playing them from your hand to some central play area. Instead, the cards, laid out before you, are your play area; they are presented there to you face up, and you manipulate them to play the game.

And that play comes down to resource management. You manage your cards, your workstations (that is to say, places where you can put those resources to work), your time (as the game does play out in real-time, though you can pause at will), and items in the world (which are not unlike cards, but you cannot carry them with you quite as easily). Your goal is to be the keeper of the Hush House library and maybe a bit more, but I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers.

And finally, it’s not a punishing game, as it tells you. And this is absolutely true, but it is also the most significant difference between Book of Hours and Cultist Simulator. While the latter is a difficult, obtuse mess of a game, this one is merely obtuse and a bit of a mess (I would say palpably less so, yes).

2) What’s so great about it?

(I realise what you see here might be confusing, but let me assure you there is indeed a cat and it purrs.)

Secret History games and their predecessors, the Fallen London games (if you are not familiar with those, you like what I’m talking about, but my criticism is putting you off, try those; they are… more manageable due to a more conservative approach to the interface), have one huge, massive and very important thing going out for them:

THE ATMOSPHERE

Taken from a mechanical perspective, the games are not particularly complex, nor deep, nor engaging. They are complicated, yes, which without a redeeming feature would make them even worse, but how you play them very likely isn’t the reason why you’d want to.

The appeal of these games are the pictures they paint in your mind. And those pictures are delightful. Book of Hours is an absolute delight to the senses. The way it looks and sounds compliments the text, and the writing itself is very pleasing. It captures this essence of Librarianhood and taps into the Secret Histories setting’s occult lore to give it just that little bit of extra spice. You could very much remove the occult from this game, and you’d still have an excellent librarian simulator, but you’d also get a lesser game than what it currently is.

I will also compliment the interface in regard to the tactile feeling of performing actions in game, which is hard to capture with such an abstract interface. Still, the various ambient noises of locations combine with the sounds made by items as you manipulate them and altogether blend with the rest of the game seamlessly. My favourite is the little kitty that makes little mrps and purrs as you manipulate it, which will no doubt surprise no one who happens to know me.

Thus, hiring some assistance to help restore the library, talking with them about the weather, serving them some tea or wine and then talking some more before committing them to work. At the same time, you pick up an occult text and try to unearth its secrets, and it all comes very naturally. Even if what you do in the game might be just a hazy representation of those events, it feels good to do it.

3) So why not recommend it?

(Behold, the Wisdoms view, the bane of your existence if you choose to play this game.)

Well, apart from the niche appeal the game possesses in its own right, it’s… rough around the edges. Cultist Simulator was worse, but while Book of Hours fixes those issues, it creates new problems as it goes along.

Now, you might think that what I’m swinging at is how obtuse the games are. I don’t think that their obtuse nature is a problem, as much as it is an actual draw, as it very much aligns with real occult research. Both games contain everything you need to figure out what you’re supposed to do and how… It’s just that as you continue to play, the interface falls apart around you under the deluge of more and more stuff you can interact with, a huge part of which goes directly into your tableau.

Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours have the same fundamental issue: they lack an efficient way to look for what you need at a given moment. Sure, with enough time, you will find those things, as you can just pause both games and take your time. You can also try to help yourself by taking notes and self-organising the spaces in the game. You are a librarian, organising the books is your job, that’s fine.

But let me just tell you about upgrading Soul cards because that’s when I really started wanting to stop playing. The first problem comes from the Wisdom panel. It took me almost two hours to upgrade five cards, not because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because every time I tried to upgrade a card, it triggered a long, drawn-out process of sorting my skill cards, to find one I can potentially use for the upgrade. Much of this is because it’s tough to tell what a skill is by looking at its card (it’s just abstract artwork and a title). When you mouse over it, things get quickly explained by the Aspects, but you need to do it one card at a time, and you might have… a few dozen of them. And there’s just no way to search cards by Aspect in any reasonable way. You can mouse over an Aspect (they are the attributes that describe things, those little square pictures/glyphs; for example, Terrance the Chicken might be Scale 3, Sky 1, Beast, Comfort, Co-operative; that might not tell you much right now, but as you play the game it quickly starts making sense) but that means you need to find something with that Aspect and then mouse over the icon. Some Aspects are scarce, and some things (like upgrading Soul) require multiple inputs, each of which has specific requirements defined by several Aspects.

There are more, numerous in fact, QoL issues with the interface, and it is by far the weakest part of the game. It looks great, but it actually actively gets in the way of playing the game.

But that’s how Weather Factory games are; possibly, maybe, hopefully we’ll get some mod that can fix some of this.

Another point of criticism I’d like to levy against the game is the randomisation. While it seems that you will be able to finish the game regardless of how the random elements play out (the layout of the books in the library primarily), you can have better or worse starts. With a good start, you can do a lot, often at once, and keep a pace for progressing through the game. With a bad start, everything becomes slow and tedious. And to an extent, I’d much prefer to go out in a blaze of glory due to my mistakes (Cultist Simulator) than to just keep getting suffocated by the game’s unwillingness to throw me a bone.

Now, this section is a little bit longer, but I hope that explains the issues. They are not fundamental problems with the game’s design but rather with the implementation of the interface.

And to sum up, ultimately, those problems aren’t even the reason why I’d not recommend this game. It’s just more so that the game is not for everyone, and it’s really something you should look at individually and subjectively, and decide.