This game is SO CLOSE to being AMAZING, it HURTS that it ultimately falls short and feels very frustrating to play.
The writing is great and it works very well as a "WoD" game, but the implementation of the skill checks and the signalling about what you do with certain options and what you are facing in terms of future challenges is so inconsistent and BAD, that it ultimately RUINS the fun you have playing this AS a "Choose your own adventure" game - because you CAN'T.
If you DO, the game will punish you with rolling out skill checks you can't beat and opaquely worded options, that you can't succeed in, because you didn't pick one option, you didn't know about, three text boxes ago.
It's tragic and not what the level of writing and storytelling in this game DESERVES.

I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, an adept weaving of seemingly authentic Irish folklore and a compelling and driving story that makes you WANT to turn another page and then another and another and so forth.
My deepest respect towards the writer who managed to not only create a compelling "Choose your own adventure" novel, but also weave in countless nods and tidbits about the World of Darkness - this truly SHINES as a game in the WoD as a whole, much like Night Road, or Parliament of Knives does.

It starts rather slow, but gives you plenty of choices and time for the characters and the location to breathe and gather momentum, where it unfortunately falls flat is the actual IMPLEMENTATION of the game mechanics.
At first everything feels WONDERFUL, I was having an absolute BLAST just getting to know the characters, going with the flow and sketching out my own character in the process, succeeding even on the first skill checks, but then during the middle to later chapters, everything comes crashing down and becomes INCREDIBLY frustrating to play.
From the middle of the game onwards you will just get confronted with skill checks that seem to be incredibly steep in nature and that have ZERO foreshadowing, not allowing you to invest in the necessary skills beforehand, furthermore actions and the corresponding skill checks are not consistent. Some skills (like Strength) seem to be incredibly under utilized, while others are nearly always useful (Intelligence + Technology). Many times you are faced with checks that give you three different options which you are not BUILD to use, leading to a failure, which leads to LESS XP, which then again leads to having less options to succeed and so forth. Really bad design.
There is very ambiguous signaling about what choice does what (even WITH the Storyteller mode), so I found myself restarting the game literally three times, just to be able to finish it ONCE - which detracted severely from the joy of playing it.

Ultimately this came SO close to being AT LEAST as good as Parliaments of Knives, or even Night Road, but the inconsistent "game" aspect ruins it.

Well-realized NPC's and a couple of gripping scenes at the end. Not as complex or humorous as _Book of Hungry Names_, but still worth playing.

Instead of killing monsters i'm doing them, what a game