During the course of my current Masters studies online, I'm looking for little lightweight games to play to just take a short break between learning tasks and lectures. Something that is interesting, but not too deep... to give my brain a little bit of a distraction from educational theories!

Book of Demons is a light, papercraft themed roguelike that just might scratch that light gaming itch! Originally developed and published in 2018 by Thing Games on PC, it has recently seen ports to consoles including the Nintendo Switch. Despite the fact that this game might be a bit more at home on a travelling console, I primarily play it on a full sized gaming laptop due to the study. A bit of a power overkill, but you make do with the hardware that you have in front of you!

The Setup

Okay... how is it possible to not like a game which references the menu system as the Archive of Awesome! Well, that pretty much sets up the expectations of the style and humour throughout the game. It is cute and very much tongue-in-cheek.

There really is very little in the way of solid storyline to the whole game. It really is a bit of a cheeky aside to the more established Diablo games, that there is a village and there is a pit to hell formed under it... and for some reason, your hero is the amnesiac who has decided to venture into the depths to defeat the grand demon beneath. Most of the characters (including the hero) are un-named... often going by general names like "The Maid", "The Sage" or "The Cook".

The lack of deep story appears to be a conscious decision to focus resources better towards game development (it is an indie studio). In addition, the game appears to be set up as the basis upon which mods and further DLC will flesh out different campaigns with specific stories. So, more like a generic toolkit for further elaboration rather than the complete finished product. That said, the gameplay is completely developed, just narrative is quite adaptable!

In the base game, there is a generic selection of three hero classes which will affect the skills, artifacts and cards that you will be playing the game with. These are the standard Warrior, Rogue and Mage tropes with the expected strengths and weaknesses of each class.

The Game

Every dive into the dungeon pit (actually, the castle in the distance of the picture above!) starts and ends at the unnamed village. From here, you will prepare your cards (equipment and skills) for the adventure ahead as well as unlocking little narrative elements that flesh out the relationships between the villagers and the hero.

Book of Demons adopts a novel system for equipment inventory. Each hero has a pool of Health (Red) and Mana (Blue). The health is pretty self-explanatory, you run out, you die. However, the blue mana pool is used for activating skills in the dungeon. The twist is that to equip cards, you need to lock away a portion of your mana pool (locked mana is green) which makes it unavailable for skill activation. As expected, the more powerful the skill or equipment, the more mana it locks up! So, a balance of what you want to take into the dungeon against how often you can actually use it!

When you enter the dungeon, you "create" your custom run using the Flexiscope. You have the choice of altering he length and difficulty of your run, to balance risk against the treasure and XP rewards.

The navigation of the dungeon is an on-rails exploration of a papercraft dungeon. The enemies (and loot) are free to roam around the dungeon, whilst you are restricted to the path. All the heroes have varying ranges for their skills and weapons and you can freely backtrack along the path as much as you like. This mechanic feels initially restrictive, but as you get more accustomed to it, it is a nice way to play the game... after all, in games like Diablo, you are essentially going to try and max out the exploration of the map! This way, you know easily where you need to go without endless running from one side to and other to map sure the whole map is revealed!

In the dungeon, enemies (especially bosses and sub-bosses) will drop loot ranging from gold through to skill/equipment cards. These cards are sometimes immediately revealed, but other times (in the case of the magical and rare cards) they are locked and need to be identified before use. Something that the Sage at the village can help you with (for a price....).

The card system is the replacement for the RPG inventory. Each card represents a skill or a piece of equipment that can aid you in your dungeon adventures, but they will lock up part of your usable mana when equipped. Each card has attributes that will depend on their rarity level, and each card has three levels of upgradeability. Upgrades are done with the Fortune Teller at the village and will require an input of runes and gold (everything needs gold....) which are destroyed on the upgrade.

Given the limited amount of gold and runes, it is likely that you will need to choose carefully about which cards you end up upgrading as it appears that you can't do them all! Nowhere close! Upgrades enhance the effectiveness of the existing skills/equipment traits, but generally also add an extra one per level. Rare cards will start with multiple traits, so these are most definitely worth upgrading!

Like most rogue-like games, you will die. However, Book of Demons is pretty forgiving about dying... it just costs gold and all the treasure that you have accumulated. However, recovering equipment and cards is as simple as trekking back to your corpse! There is also the leaderboard, which only records your progress up to your first death for each generated character.

So, there is a different incentive for avoiding death. The Barmaid has a cooking cauldron in which you cook your magical ingredients that you find in the dungeon for rewards in the form of rare cards, gold and runes. The catch is that each "cooking" costs progressively more in gold each time... which means that to get the best efficiency out of this lottery, you want to use as many ingredients in each cooking as possible. However, the ONLY thing that is permanently destroyed upon death are... you guessed it, the ingredients! So, this is the risk-reward mechanic which entices players to push the boundaries of deep and far they want to go in the dungeon with underpowered equipment!

Visuals, Sound and Performance

I love the papercraft visuals of this game. I know that it can be a bit of a divisive art style, but I really love papercraft... especially when compared to 8 bit retro/pixel graphics. There is just something touchingly naïve about papercraft that is such a pleasant juxtaposition to the "serious" matter of killing demons!

Special highlights go to the voiced characters in the game. Although all of them are static and not animated, the voices, sound and music all evoke fond memories of the original Diablo game! In fact, if you closed your eyes and just listened to the narrative, you could really mistake the game for the original Diablo!

Performance-wise, this is a very undemanding game. The game has been ported over to the comparatively anaemic hardware of the Nintendo Switch... so, this game will run comfortably on pretty much any PC hardware of the last decade. I'm not even sure that the game fires up the dGPU of my XMG Fusion 15... if it did, I should probably force it to the iGPU to save battery!

My Thoughts

Book of Heroes is one of these games that are slightly more engaging than the casual mobile time wasters, whilst being less deep than the heaviest of hardcore PC simulations. It is that nice swet spot of not too deep, yet still engaging and interesting to play. It doesn't have that same depth that games like Diablo or Torchlight might have, but it isn't aiming for that experience of near infinite loot satisfaction.

It is a great game for what it is, with a touching art style and tongue in cheek humour that makes it a pleasure to play in short bursts when you just need to take some time out. I am curious about how the developer (or community) intends to flesh out the basic game. At the moment, it appears that there is going to be a space themed free DLC in the near future!

Review Specs

Played at 1080p (144Hz) on:

XMG Fusion 15

CPU: Intel Core i7-9750H
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD (SATA/Nvme)
GPU: Nvidia GTX 2070 Max-Q

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