Book of Demons is a deck-building hack and slash adventure game, where it’s the player who decides the length of quests. The game is the first installment of Return 2 Games–a series of original mid-core games, inspired by the early golden days of PC gaming.
Book of Demons puts players in charge of one of three characters taking part in an epic, but humorous quest to save Paperverse from total destruction. While the game facilitates the player in every possible way, the quest itself surely is not a piece of cake. To defend the world from ultimate devilry, players will have to explore procedurally-generated dungeons, confront over seventy monster species and fight a brigade of evil bosses, including the nasty Archdemon. If someone wants to hang out in the catacombs a bit longer, well, of course he can–there’s a Freeplay mode where players can master their favorite quests and rise to the challenge by completing the game on higher difficulty levels.
What makes Book of Demons stand out is the number of twists in the basic gameplay mechanics, impossible to overlook paper cut-out graphics, a dark theme intertwined with a fair dose of humor, and most importantly–the unprecedented accessibility.
The hallmark of Book of Demons is the character development mechanic. The game supersedes the usual hack and slash statfest with a single solution–a card system. Players will collect, upgrade and combine skill cards to compose their own decks of powers. Sounds pretty simple, however there is no ultimate card set that fits all the situations–to survive, gamers will have to constantly come up with new strategies and implement regular adjustments to their skill collections.
The second feature which greatly increases Book of Demons’ ease of play is the possibility to select the length of each quest, so players can choose if they would like to embark on a longer, more epic journey or take on a five-minute mission. Shorter missions do not mean they are easier, though–thanks to the Flexiscope system, players will always experience the same intensity of gameplay, no matter the length of current quest.
The game is going to be a console exclusive on Xbox One and priced at $20 on the store. No release date was provided but the game should be available quite soon.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.