Black Book, from developer Mortheshka and publisher HypeTrain Digital, can be a tricky game to love at times. Twenty-six turns into a card battle with a cat demon, poking its head out of the mouth of a young girl and soundly mocking me every chance it gets, I lose. Reload the save game, start once more. Nineteen turns in, I lose again. Maybe I just wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved at the time. Maybe I’d misread a sign or piece of information and need to think more on that. Sigh, switch off the Xbox, go for a walk and ruminate on life.
Black Book is a sort of RPG with heavy text adventure and some basic point-and-click elements strung over a solid skeleton of a card collecting deck-building battle game. Oh, plus there’s a whole other card game, Durak, which serves as a kind of mini-game that can be played with companions. Another mini-game sees you sending out the demons you’ve defeated to plague the landscape, matching demons to specific tasks. You don’t have to do that, though. You can be nice and kind and keep your demons at home, but do that and they eventually turn on you. Lots to get your head around!
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You play as Vasilisa. Your fiancé has killed himself, thus damning his soul. You decide this simply isn’t okay, so you will save him. To do that, you must take up the vocation of a ‘knower’, or witch – strongly supported by your adopted father who is also a knower – and use the power of the Black Book to rescue his soul. In turn, you pledge yourself to Hell, which is where your fiancé is supposed to be. Satan is now your boss, basically, but… well… let’s gloss over that. The Black Book is locked behind seven seals, all must be opened so as to claim your prize. Each seal essentially denotes its own story chapter with rich flowing narrative and various side quests. In amongst the story – working out how to open each seal – you’ll be called upon to help people in your role as knower. This will send you out into the world, invariably to drive out demons from places in one way or another that mostly involves card battles, which can be as much fun as frustrating.
The core card battling element seems straightforward at first, but involves some advanced mechanics and strategy which I’ll admit to still not fully having got my head around, as the opening paragraph may reveal. To put it in it’s simplest terms: each turn, you draw a hand to play from and you use 3 cards out of that hand. Each card is basically attack, defend or buff. On top of that, you can also make use of a companion (if you have one with you) and use herbs to either heal, add to attack or defence scores or add/remove buffs. At the end of each round, you deal out another hand. If you defeat your enemy then various things could happen, story related or not. If you lose all your health points, you die. Simple as that.
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The art style is charming and jumps from hand drawn 2d cartoons and static backgrounds when dealing with conversations or exploration, to low poly 3d modelled characters and environments for the “point-and-click” areas and battles. It is all perfectly in keeping with the themes, though, and serves the game perfectly throughout.
Black Book is practically dripping in Northern Slavic mythology and lore, which is something that grabbed my attention from the start. The lore and overall storytelling is definitely the strength of the game, but be warned – it doesn’t wear kid gloves when taking you through things, which is wonderfully refreshing, if challenging at times. You’ll have to learn different names for things for a start, like the aforementioned “knower” for witch or “chort” for demon, amongst many others, but it’s worth sticking with to get the most from the story and game overall. You also can’t just zoom around the map. To get from your starting point to your end destination, you must travel to many points in-between, but this serves to flesh out the world building and where most of the ‘text adventure’ side of things is seen. It’s also how you build up experience and gold, too.
Overall, Black Book is an ambitious game that will reward you if you give it focus, but can be tough going. It’s not easy to just pick up casually. If you give it focus and patience, it certainly pays you back in enjoyment. And chorts.
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