Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle

Great game. Needs some work on the interface to bring it up to par to similar VN. Badly needs the ability to look at the inventory when you're on the map screen

If I could throw more money at this game I would.

If you ever played a gamebook, have any interest in choose your own adventure titles, enjoyed any Vanillaware titles or just like somewhat dark fantasy settings with an interesting premise this one's an easy reccomend. If you hate reading or non action games then stay far, far away. Really enjoyed the art and interesting scenarios with lots of different ways for encounters to play out. At the time of review I've only played Paneri (the cute witch), but I'm interested in how Havelock (the warrior) plays. The length was perfect too, about 5-6 hours for a playthrough. My only gripes are that I was so powerful at the end of the game I could have failed half my rolls and still won and it would have been nice to see how your actions affected some of the people you encountered in the ending.

This is a game-book in the vein of classic Fighting Fantasy books, for better or worse. Be prepared for soft-locks, level drain, resource management and instant death traps. The fact that saving anywhere is possible slightly blunts a lot of this, making the game not actually very challenging, but on a first playthrough at least it does feel like you're using your knowledge and judgement. The writing is pretty decent, and it takes a relatively basic setup in a pretty interesting direction. The character art is fantastic, as the creators' pedigree would suggest. Overall, I'd say this is a refreshing take on the concept, and certainly held my attention better than, say, the visual novel format. Whether I keep buying these virtual game books is another matter though. That will probably depend on if they can manage to keep things interesting.

The plot got a bit convoluted for my tastes and the RNG nature of a handful of the events wound up to be a bit frustrating, but overall a good time, the "free exploration" parts were neat and the Dark Castle in particular was giving me some strong Shadowgate vibes, it was just fun to see what manner of tomfoolery you came across next. The pen & paper UI is stylish, the art and and music is great and all in all the game comes across as a sincere effort.

[h3] Great game but can be unfair at times and some balancing issues [/h3] Overall I enjoyed my time, my only gripe was mainly the combat, not so much that its dice base but more so that you don't have a lot of ways to increase your odds. In dnd you have spells, proficiency, advantage etc to influence your odds but this game has none of that. The way combat works is both you and the enemy roll 2d6 and add your level, who ever has the highest number gets to attack. Early on your at most going to be on par or 1 lvl higher then the enemy so a lot of times it literally comes down to the dice and it can be frustrating if you get bad rng. Late game you end up being 3+lvls higher then enemies so at that point the rng isn't that bad I also felt the mage didn't really play like a mage, you have a spell book with around 10-25charges and spells consume anywhere from 4-10 charges (you don't replenish charges). You don't come across many spell books and if you do they are expensive so most of the time you are going to be very conservative on your spells to the point where your just playing as a warrior cosplaying as a witch. Generally you also want to avoid combat, for the following reasons …