Book of Demons has easily become one of my favorite games of 2018. Not least because of its easily accessible nature and approachable systems, but also because it has managed to cram in extremely well fleshed out systems that you'd find in hack 'n' slash dungeon crawlers by bigger studios. While it's not as complex or excessively deep in areas you'd see in games like Path of Exile or Grim Dawn, I'd argue it's just as challenging in many ways. What surprised me the most about this game was the sheer polish on something that appears to at first be so simplistic. The opening cut scene blew me away not because it was high octane madness, but simply because it had been so well produced for a game advertised as an on-rails papercraft dungeon adventure. It never ceased to surprise me.

In terms of negativity, there's just not a lot to complain about. To be frank, most people can just watch a gameplay trailer and say "that's not for me" as what's on offer is fairly obvious and to the point. If you watched some gameplay and thought it was interesting, then I have very little to dissuade you. The game has essentially no video options, but it's a papercraft title that uses about as much horsepower as Microsoft Excel and makes up for it by not being FPS capped. My one main complaint is that mouse lag was very, very obvious when VSync was turned on and caused a fair amount of irritation until I just turned VSync off entirely, but that is hardly a deal breaker.

What it does offer, however, is a total respect of your time. You can choose how long your dungeon adventures last, ranging from a few minutes to an hour-long session. Over the last week, I'd wake up and get ready for work before jumping into a seven-minute-long dungeon crawl and then the car. It's an utterly beautiful system. Skills and equipment are done with cards and card slots on your character, which offer not only a wide variety of skills and armor, but a full fat upgrade system and rarity system for you to work towards, all of which make a real discernible difference in gameplay. The difficulty curve is probably one of the most perfect ones I've ever seen, with the game starting off dead easy and progressively getting more and more challenging to the point where I couldn't believe how well they'd managed to weave difficulty into such a simple title. Boss battles are suitably hard and extremely varied, and they've managed to implement invulnerable stages to bosses without making it feel like a cheap cop out. As I mentioned earlier; the overall presentation of the game, the audio cues, the voice acting, the writing—it's all just so damn flush, I'd be delighted to see Thing Trunk's budget double to see what more they could achieve.