Was Book of Demons Worth It?

Sorry to all the avid readers out there, but this book is actually a hack-and-slash videogame! Set a timeframe for this quest, because today we’re asking “Was Book of Demons Worth It?”

Background

This is a hack (card?) and slash game where the aesthetic conceit is that everything is paper cutouts. It works, in a Bug Fables or Paper Mario sort of way.

When I first heard of this game, I heard it described as being “respectful of your time”. What does that mean? Well, the reasoning here is that you choose how long you want to play by setting a quest length.

The gameplay loop is simple: you bounce through the dungeons, kill monsters, collect loot, rinse and repeat. There are a couple different difficulty modes and classes to play as. Progression isn’t shared between classes, so keep that in mind. I tried all three classes: warrior, rogue, and mage, and preferred the warrior. There’s also some merit to the adaptive learning of the Flexiscope, as I noticed that my estimated quest lengths would vary depending on how quickly I cleared them.

What does it do well?

The leveling gimmick is interesting. You choose whether you want an additional Health or Mana point, and the other is stored for later – you can purchase it back in town for an escalating price. Health is the intuitive choice, but Mana is what you use as a currency to equip artifact cards. Some artifact cards have fantastic abilities, such as the Shadow Sword card I found on my very first quest that literally doubled my DPS, or the shield that nulled a percentage of projectiles (incredibly useful).

What could it do better?

This is a port of a PC game, and it shows. The controls are functional enough on the Switch, but there’s that little bit of frustration that comes with navigating a user interface that was made for a mouse. This gets incredibly annoying when dealing with mobs that require you to individually target them to disrupt their spellcasting or break their armor.

Enemies that go dormant, heal, and shoot an AOE are particularly irritating. The game says “avoid annoying these monsters”…What about annoying the player? Why do I have to wait for a gargoyle to get a cheeky attack on me before I can destroy it?

There’s also the issue of character movement. You’re essentially on rails, which is fine until you realize that you can’t move through mobs, and it also means that you have a limited room to dodge incoming projectiles. Eventually you’ll find that your only path forward will be straight into enemies that are flinging projectiles at you from off screen. You’ll also find yourself being mobbed by enemies that you can’t clear fast enough because you’re wasting attacks on enemies with shields or other damage mitigating effects, and you didn’t break through their defenses because you were trying to target another enemy with the imprecise console controls.

The game also likes to have you enter a room with a mob of enemies (and a boss, possibly) right on the other side of the door. These are resource-burning DPS checks. Fortunately, if you die, you can retrieve your items, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re better off when you reattempt the fight.

Is it fun?

Getting new cards is exciting, but it doesn’t quite outweigh the fact that a lot of the dungeon crawling feels tedious. I only played on normal difficulty, but I imagine roguelike would feel extremely annoying since you can’t buy more healing potions.

Value?

I picked up this game on sale for 2.49 (90% off) on the Switch eShop. Technically, I got it for free since I used Gold Points to buy it.

Is a free game worth it? Obviously.

Is it worth it at 90% off? Yes.

Is it worth it at full price, a whopping 24.99? No.

Was Book of Demons Worth It?

The progression part of the gameplay loop is great. Finding new cards to slot into my build felt great every time they dropped. However, the exploration part is where it fell apart. I’d frequently enter a room and instantly recognize that I was about to have a bad time.

Looking for more?

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