"Black Book" - although the project is punk, postmodernly ironic, and accessible in the light format of a visual novel, it does something completely unique for us - it allows us to experience this core, authentic magical Russia that we didn't witness. And you were telling me that "Hellblade" is a "simulator of walking through an ethnographic museum."
Nothing of the sort! If "Hellblade" is a simulator of anything, it's psychosis, and the bizarre and painful perception of the eschatological Nordic epic by a Pictish girl is so out of focus in the narrative that it most likely went unnoticed by most players. But "Black Book" is a game with a bright and lovingly crafted emphasis on folklore, about an ordinary witch girl from the Cherdyn district in the Perm Governorate.

We play as a girl named Vaska, a wise woman, a sorceress, a witch, who, for the sake of the plot, sets out to save her beloved from Hell, who died under the most mysterious circumstances. But that's always the case, lovers do that left and right in games. We wander through towns and villages, listen to folk tales, sing folk songs on the porch, talk to all sorts of very real unclean spirits - house spirits and bath spirits, and even save Russia a little from demonocracy. In the process, we immerse ourselves in folk life - this is how they took a bath in Russia, this is how they got married, and this is how, for example, salt was mined in Solikamsk!

Behind all this, there may be some deep subtext about the nature of evil, because formally, the game has "good," "evil," and "neutral" playthroughs, but these are all shades of a very gray morality, and the protagonist's power is demonic in any case.

The entry threshold for the game is low - the main mechanic here is card-based, and, honestly, the developers, in my opinion, realize that it didn't turn out very exciting (I have something to compare it to, a hundred and fifty hours in "Slay the Spire" won't let me lie), so after a couple of losses, the game gives a "skip battle" button, so that you don't have to suffer.

In conclusion: I think "Black Book" is worth playing if you can handle games that focus on text rather than action. There's zero action here, but the opportunity for a journey, to pre-revolutionary Perm Krai. And you can also reflect a bit on your cultural code.

PPS. You'll definitely need a Russian-to-Russian dictionary in this game XD.