Black Book

This is a card-battler with a significant story.

You play the role of a young witch trying to save her deceased beloved's soul. There are essentially 3 modes to the game: (1) storybook mode, where you move along a path, encountering events and choosing how to interact with them among multiple choices, (2) fight mode, where you use your card deck to face one or more enemies, and (3) adventure mode, where you move your character around to interact with people and objects.

I got 36 hours of playtime and really enjoyed this game!

THE GOOD:

• Interesting story
• Compelling characters that are likable despite their flaws
• Really interesting to learn about Russian mythology and the way of thinking of ordinary Russians several hundred years ago. The influence of Christianity warped previous Slavic beliefs on demons and turned them all into minions of Hell instead of simple spirits of nature. It's all presented in digestible bite-sized pieces in the main story and in little mythology tidbits you pick up over time.
• It's kind of funny and shocking (for the first few times at least) to experience demon-summoning practitioners of black magic praise God and make the sign of the cross.
• The card-based combat mechanic is generally well-done. There are a lot of variety of cards, in-game status effects, and enemies.
• During your companions' special quests you encounter puzzle battles that put aside your regular deck and force you to think through how to beat the enemies with a special set of cards. These are probably the most interesting battles!
• There's a pretty good plot twist at the climax of the story!
• The ending is heavily influenced by your cumulative decisions during the game.

THE BAD:

• The Onomasticon (the mythology guide) didn't always provide answers to the little quizzes in the game. I was often left scratching my head.
• It was very easy for me to find an unstoppable winning strategy in combat (a Waste deck). This led the combat to be a bit repetitive. I felt that more could have been done in the game to require the player to adopt different strategies.
• The story is a pretty strict railroad. You have relatively few impactful choices to make (all of them tend to lead to the same place) with mainly the option to be good or evil.
• It would be nice if the game were more clear about exactly how many sins are required to push you over the edge into evil. I went to a lot of effort to end the game with 0 sins just in case!

THE UGLY:

• There are lots of demons and references to Hell, which might offend you.
• I'm personally offended by the idea that burying someone outside of a churchyard would automatically send their soul to Hell.
• The game crashed once.
• During adventure mode, there a few scenes where the camera angle loses sight of the protagonist, leading to some fumbling around to try to figure out how to get her back into view.
• When walking around in a scene using the controller, it could be tricky to select certain interaction points (requiring me to use the mouse).