Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this game. The audience of people who will uncritcally enjoy it is pretty small, but if you can get in the right mindset it's fun and has a lot to offer. The main thing to keep in mind is that it's like a 90s gamebook, with all the good and bad that implies. To be up front, this game does not have: - deeply branching story - character customization - interesting combat - good quality of life around saves This game does have: - (inconsistently) beautiful art - many weird surprising encounters - adventure game puzzles, like "find the crank handle" - a satisfying plot Things start off pretty rough. You're on a mission to this city for reasons that are kind of abstract. You have to fight golems and zombies at the start for unclear reasons, and nothing seems to have anything to do with your character or their mission that you just heard about. You have relatively few resources so you don't have much informed choice in combat or encounters. It's not awful, but it can be a bit of a slog. As you keep playing, the story starts to show connections, and you get more resources that give you options to plan around. You also have more freedom in where you move around, not all combat encounters kill you, and so you feel more in control, and it's a lot more fun. It's unfortunate that the beginning of the game is not more like this. The main thing that will determine whether you can enjoy the game or not is how you feel about arbitrary choices. Throughout the game there will be things like "do you go through the right door or the left door?", with no context, and one choice just kills you. Or "roll a d6, if you roll a 1 you die", with absolutely no way to mitigate things. The saving grace is that if you die you can rewind to the choice that killed you or slightly before. There are many choices that are not like this and properly balance information, or risk and reward, but these choices are basically always there and I have no idea why the writer thought that was a good idea! The rewind feature is unfortunately very limited - there's nothing here like the Inkle Sorcery games, which did an amazing job making navigating books with arbitrary bad things pleasant and playful. In this game, you can only rewind if you die, and the game chooses what point to take you to. This never got me anywhere near a softlock, but it was a bit distressing. While the game constantly autosaves, there are also only five or six times in the whole game that you can save manually unless I missed something. Encounters are weird and wondeful and all over the place, in classic gamebook fashion. They do often have some in-world justification and aren't completely arbitrary, but it's best to think of this as something like Alice in Wonderland. The mood is somewhere between Time Cave (less random, about as much death) and Deathtrap Dungeon or City of Thieves (this game won't try to kill you *that* much, and there are no antagonistic or overly elaborate puzzles). There are a *ton* of encounters, and most of them should be optional for success. I mentioned that the game isn't deeply branching. You're not going to drastically affect the main story with your choices, but there are lots of little branches that can fill in sub-stories, or just be some weird thing that happened. If you can get in the mood of those old gamebooks, where you play strategically but accept that you're kind of along for the ride, it's fun to see all the weird stuff that happens, and to figure out how all the pieces fit together - and, thankfully, most of them do! But if you can't tolerate arbitrary choices, or want a game where you enjoy character builds (for combat) or getting to understand a character psychologically, you might find this more frustrating than fun. If you've ever enjoyed a gamebook and you like the look of the trailer, I would encourage you to check this out - if you aren't turned off by the way the story goes in the demo, you'll definitely enjoy the full game.