Similar to cultist sim the opening half of the game is incredible, but once you've learned the game's systems it gets very repetitive and tedious. I think Book of Hours is great if you just want to uncover the game's mechanics and take a victory as early as you can. If you're aiming to uncover every room and read every book then prepare yourself for hours of repetitive crafting, since you'll need a dozen copies of items that take 4+ steps to craft and you have to do it all manually. This makes for hundreds of repetitions. If there were a way to somehow automate crafting after you'd already made an item (Similar to how after reading a book once you don't need to meet its requirements to read it again) the mid and endgame would be much more bearable.

The beginning of the game really is a blast, like you're genuinely piecing together an enormous puzzle one small fraction at a time. The later game feels like trying to play factorio entirely by hand-crafting. The opening is so strong and I love the writing so much that I would recommend the game in spite of its second half being a complete bomb.

Tl;dr learning to craft powerful magical items and memories is amazing. Having to spend two days re-crafting them after each use is madness.

BOOK OF HOURS contains all the esoteria of Cultist Simulator, in a much more accessible package. Fans of Weather Factory's "dark academia" aesthetic who are more inclined towards "cozy games" than brain-burning puzzles will find much more satisfaction here than in their freshman effort. These developers really know how to immerse you in a world, providing just enough bits and pieces to keep you interested while withholding most of the setting's reality from your view. It's truly a happy medium between FromSoft's item description breadcrumbs and Disco Elysium's breathless infodumping that captures all the mystery of the former along with the detail of the latter.

Figuring out how to use and combine elements to progress is maddeningly addictive. In a lot of ways, BOOK OF HOURS is a crafting game bar none; yet one where what you're crafting is "emotions and impressions" rather than pickaxes and furniture. Hush House seems to be the perfect place to crystallize a thought out of beams of light and spiderwebs using a piano or a telescope; it's the kind of historical amalgam that only an old world mansion can be. Just when you think you've unlocked the perfect room to place your brewed hot tea or cocoa in, you learn how to get a cat and the cozy vibes just skyrocket.

If Cultist Simulator was evocative of madness being a kind of magic, BOOK OF HOURS is a meditation on the arcana of introspection. Every item, every person, every thought has one of several elements to it; kind of like a feng shui that is revealed through a mouseover tooltip rather than an augury-driven journey through the I Ching. Combining these elements and guessing what item will give which becomes intuitive after a while, and experimenting with them to progress your Journal makes you feel like a real alchemist. Combine them into ever more distilled and powerful forms to drive goals that the game refuses to set for you.

BOOK OF HOURS makes me wonder whether my own issues are due to some kind of failure to curate the elements of my own thoughts and impressions of the objects that surround me. Do I really need to know what Knife or Moth actually _is_ to know that I have too much of it in my life? Is there a Journal inside me where these elements are slotting in to lead towards some kind of transcendence? Or are they, like the Journal in my first playthrough attempt, just an unfocused scattering that makes it more difficult for me to progress?

It wouldn't be hard to simply review the mechanics of BOOK OF HOURS the way I do for other games. However, it feels like it would take something away from them to do so. BOOK OF HOURS is a game that provides space and atmosphere for you to think through a million mysteries that the developers have lovingly ensconced within it. However it also provides space for you to bring yourself into it, and hopefully take something out of it too. For example, the thought that changing up your blend of tea or coffee and spending an extra moment looking out the window at a different time of day could lead to a whole new way of seeing the world.

I have played all these guys' games all the way back to Fallen London. Book of Hours (and hours and hours) is in ways both the best AND worst one they've made so far.

Good: Chill, no time pressure like Cultist Sim. So you can read every little snippet, which is required.

Bad: It is definitely required. The game explicitly says so, more than once. Every possible thing in the game has multiple tags and aspects and you need to read pretty much every little note and description, all the time.

Good: It's usually worth the effort. Best vibes/lore/worldbuilding so far imo (shared universe with Cultist), beautiful hand drawn art

Bad bad bad: If you hate to look things up, do not play this. No, for real. I tried to play blind at first; ended up with like 20 tabs of wiki pages. Took over 200 hours to reach ONE ending. I do not think it was worth that kind of time investment.

These guys really need to make their games faster to get through. Not smaller, not shorter... FASTER. But I had a pretty good time nonetheless.