Book of Demons

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Book of Demons is a Top-Down Action-RPG with Roguelike elements originally released on PC in 2018 and ported to multiple platforms in 2020, including Nintendo Switch. This is a game that has a similar basic structure to a game like Diablo, but simplifies it, making attacking enemies automatic and restricting movement paths to straight lines through dungeon hallways.

Graphically, Book of Demons is pretty simplistic, using static 2D images in a 3D space to depict, at least in theory, a sort of pop-up book look, although this really only has the intended effect in cutscenes, while gameplay in dungeons themselves just looks simple, like a lazy mobile game. To be clear, the actual artwork here is decent, but the way it’s incorporated into the game just seems lazy, like the game’s creators didn’t want to bother with animation and cooked up the “pop-up book” thing as an excuse. And this is kinda’ odd, because otherwise this is absolutely not a lazy game – even in the presentation, there’s voiced story that’s decently well done, and while the music isn’t memorable, it’s at least appropriately atmospheric.

The gameplay here is similarly confusing. On the one hand, it has some really clever and interesting ideas, such as its simplified approach to dungeon-crawling. However, while the game robs the player of the ability to move freely in dungeons, positioning is still important, as enemies have a range. Also, some enemies make ranged attacks that follow a set path – you’re just kinda’ screwed if these enemies are in the middle of a long hallway because your only approach path is to run straight at them, right though their arrows.

This game also ditches the standard loot mechanics of the genre and replaces armor and weapons with cards that represent single-use items and special moves. This is, again, potentially interesting, but completely misses any opportunity to use it to do anything worthwhile. Players only have access to a limited number of cards at a time, making this more of a motif than anything resembling a card game. And there simply isn’t the sort of excitement at getting a new card that one gets with finding an awesome new sword or piece of armor in Diablo.

In the end, Book of Demons deserves a lot of credit for trying some new and interesting directions to take a Diablo-style game, but none of these interesting ideas seem to be very well thought-out, and as a result, they pretty much all only lead to frustration. And while I wouldn’t say that Book of Demons is a bad game, there’s little reason to recommend it when plenty of other games in the same vein on the eShop are far more deserving of your attention.

tl;dr – Book of Demons is a Diablo-style Action-RPG with Roguelike elements, but simplified. Unfortunately, this simplification, while novel, is done pretty poorly here, and all of the interesting things the game tries only cause frustration. Not a terrible game, but you have better options on the eShop.

Grade: C-

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