- Release Date: December 13th, 2018
- Developer: Thing Trunk
- Publisher: Thing Trunk
- Platforms: Steam
- Price: 21.99€ / $24.99
What is Book of Demons? The developer describes it as "A deck-building hack and slash adventure, where it's the player who decides the length of quests!" on their website and that pretty much sums it up. But allow me to go into more detail as to why this is a fantastic little gem of a game that fans of the genre should not skip!
Book of Demons is a love letter to hack and slash dungeon crawling games, particularly Diablo, but with very different and very original mechanics. While the game works in real time like any of the genre would, your movement is actually limited to the path you are on, and you can only move in the four cardinal directions. It almost feels like you are playing a board game, except it's all in real time and you can still dodge missiles and move away from monsters. Because the game uses this simpler gameplay, a lot of the challenge actually comes from screen management, attacking the correct enemies and more importantly, clicking on the correct things. You see, a big part of Book of Demons is clicking specific things, so much so that I'm shocked there is no mobile version (yet?). Enemy has armor that you need to break before you can hurt him? You need to click the little shield icon on his body to break the shield before you can damage him. An enemy poisoned you? You can spam click your health bar to remove the poison faster. Sometimes enemies will cast spells and have icons above their heads, well you can click and hold on those icons to stop them from casting them, or when an enemy stuns you you get a little mini-game where you have to click away a bunch of stars on the screen before you regain control. Even the looting feels like it's tailor made for a mobile seting, since you are on a specific narrow path all the time, you just click at far away chests and barrels to open them, mouse over gold to pick it up or loot items from dead monsters even if they are nowhere near you. Don't let this mobile comparisons scare you tho, it works rgeat and it actually gets very frenetic when there are lots of monsters around attacking you and you are managing your spells and what each enemy needs to be done on it, it's all very well executed and very fun.
The deck building aspect comes in the form of the various cards you collect from monsters and whatnot. But in reality, these are basically acting as your diablo skills and passives, there is no drawing of cards or shuffling of decks like an actual card game has, you have a loadout with various cards (up to a maximum of 10 through various upgrades in the town) which is your character's build, or "deck" if you want to call it that, but again, the cards are just a visual representation of skills, and they act more like the loadouts in other Diablo-style games (especially modern ones which limit how many skills you can have at any given point) than they do in something like Slay the Spire for example.
There are some cool aspects of this card system tho, you can upgrade them in town for stronger and new effects on them, and you can find rarer versions of the same card which will also have new effects. For example, the Warrior class starts with a "Pummel" card, a skill that lets you do damage on a monster and has a chance to stun them. Later on you might find a rare version of this card, and now it also makes it so it does a shockwave around the enemy when you hit it, or it heals you for a small amount. You can pick which one you want to use from your collection (seems each class has 40 cards in total, not counting the various rare variables) and they will have different costs to maintain them, so you have to create a balanced loadout to suceed, not unlike you would in a card game I suppose.
There are several other cool things about the game that I won't get into but I just want to mention one last feature and that is their "Flexiscope" system. Basically you can choose how long your dungeon runs will be, and the longer they are, the harder they get obviously and the more rewards you will have. But if you are short on time and just want to do a quick run before you head out, you can choose the shorter dungeon and just have a quick run. It's a really neat system and while I mostly just play on the longest runs, I can see how some people will apreciate being able to do shorter runs and still get the same enjoyment out of the game.
So between the 3 act campaign with various degree of length depending on how long you make each run to be, and the three available classes to choose from, each with their own specific skill cards to collect, this should easily last you a fair bit especially since the nature of the genre is replayability. The papercraft look of the game is great and really makes it feel like a boardgame come to life and the gameplay loop is just as addictive as any other dungeon crawler. Highly recomended if you are a fan of the genre.
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