Black Book

★★★★★

Far from a perfect game, but the amount of effort and love that went into this is pretty unreal for a small indie game. It's much longer than I thought it would be; I'm a little less than halfway through as far as I can tell after 13 hours. I was drawn to it from the card game perspective (I love my Slay the Spire-likes). It's definitely more of a narrative RPG. The narrative is OK, not bad not amazing. I'm honestly not a big narrative person. The game also tries to lightly enforce you paying attention to the narrative with pop quizzes that reward you with a small amount of experience. The card game element is a little easier to "solve" than I would like; some clear balance issues that show up early (behind spoiler tag: [spoiler]You can get equip multiple copies of Bursting Bone to get many free setup turns. Waste + Ward deck is basically unbeatable, too; if you've ever played STS you know the classic Silent combo of building up poison and then spending the rest of the fight blocking; it's the same idea here and it's not balanced correctly for how powerful it is. Waste probably just shouldn't be a mechanic available early or possibly at all.[/spoiler]). Even on hardest difficulty, combat is not an issue if you are a card game head (although the durak mini game on hardest difficulty feels close to impossible). I had to force myself to play a different goofy suboptimal build, keeping the optimal build in the wings for fights where the goofy build didn't work. Even still, my "optimal" deck continued to evolve over the game, which was pleasantly surprising given that I felt I had "solved" the combat system in the first chapter (I feel like I did in essence, but the tools you get over the game can still improve what you're doing). Also, there are some fights where you are forced to play a pre-built deck and those are slightly more interesting. Definitely a game for someone. Is it for me? Not sure. A little less narrative, a lot more combat depth and balance and variety would have made this game amazing for me personally. I'm still looking to finish it as I'm now curious what the end game builds start to look like and I'm not completely disinterested in seeing how the journey ends for Vasilisa either. And man, the love and passion that went into this game, you can just feel it. I'm definitely keeping an eye out for other games from this developer; if they continue pour this amount of love into what they do, they're one good swing at the bat away from a truly amazing game.