Book of Hours News

"Marksman, detective, renegade. He has always been a quiet man, but since he left the Suppression Bureau, he has grown even quieter, and terribly still - except for his fingers and for his eyes, always in restless motion."

It's June the 28th, once again. So we have presents to share! Shiny animated presents. Here's a fresh new atmospheric trailer for BOOK OF HOURS, introducing how it feels to play this melancholic, bittersweet CRPG. I hope it tugs at your heartstrings like a kitten alone in the rain.



Click to watch the 'COME HOME' trailer!

I can also now tell you useful launch info. BOOK OF HOURS will cost £19.99 / $24.99 when it releases at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Thursday 17th August. (It's double the size of Cultist Sim at launch, with 120,000 words to Cultist's mere 60,0000.) We're also offering the same Perpetual Edition deal we did when Cultist Simulator released: anyone buying the game in the first week of sale will get BOOK OF HOURS: Perpetual Edition and receive all future DLC for free, for life! (This means we're committed to releasing DLC, in case anyone's worried we'll scam 'em.)

Now, let's get to the GAME. AK's written 99 101 different endings - I am not making that up, that is not a typo, there are 99 101 different endings. [AK says: I apologise to my wife for adding content even while she's writing this blog post.] Some of them are variant endings rather than totally unique ones (my favourite is an extremely lovely homage to a famous ending of Cultist Simulator's) but I feel even our most enigmatic players still have quite enough to get on with within that vast array. With some of AK's most weird and wonderful prose, too:

"I crouch beneath like the scavenger I am, but the bloody gods favour me - I feast on furry shadows..."

We're also implementing a record system which tracks players' endings over multiple playthroughs, so you can see all your different characters' ends:



And in case you feel that's setting the bar too low, I'm working to implement 77 achievements with names like 'A Knowledge In The Look Of Things' and 'The Bells of Ys'. One of these is a total troll-y condition and I will not apologise for it. You'll know it when you achieve it. >:)

All major content is now in-game. AK's finished the core of the writing, including the Visitor stories - hence the enigmatic quote at the top of this blog. Any guesses who the quiet ex-Bureau gentleman is? We now have a month and a half of fixing and tweaking time before launch. That means we have a final round of card art, aspect art, new books, text tweaks, bug fixing and UI love before launch in August. AK will be spending a lot of time playing the game and making sure there are helpful breadcrumbs just the right side of esoteric to lead players enjoyably through the game, while I'll be desperately polishing assets, taking screenshots for our Steam page (finally!) and adding all the little extras that should make the game sing, like custom cursors...



... and fixing crabbed old fossils like this. 😅



This is what the save menu looks like currently. It will not be what the save menu looks like in August. [sez you. - AK]

Finally, all Cucurbit Gaol and underground Dawn rooms are now in-game and functional. Some took a lot more effort than others (the Night Gallery with all its shadowy swathed-paintings was particularly complicated) but that means the game can really be properly fully played and all of Hush House unlocked. So our last beta - the NOCTURNAL beta - launches on Monday 17th July and runs until Friday 28th July. It will include all rooms up to the end of the Cucurbit Gaol, a bunch (if not all) our endings, and probably achievements. It will be our last beta before launch - we want to save the true horror/wonder of DAWN for the full game.

Look how pretty it looks in winter.

Hope you felt the love and loss in the new trailer, and are as excited as I am for release! That is: terrified and determined, like a storm-wracked sailor at dawn. Stay tuned.

“After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain…
…I speak to you now with the land’s voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.”

— Howard Nemerov, ‘A Spell Before Winter’ (1962)

By the time you read this I’ll be in Dungeness, a wonderfully desolate shingle headland in Kent where I go for writing breaks, sometimes (although inaccurately) called ‘Britain’s only desert.’. Dungeness features an army of gulls, three lighthouses, two defunct nuclear power stations, a snack shack, a lot of sky and absolutely zero distractions. I’ll work happy twelve hour days, subsist on cornichons and rainwater and a half a bottle of emergency late night Eagle Rare, come back with the last major writing tasks complete. These are the visitor stories – The Affair of the God in the Wood, The Affair of the Threshold Revolt – and the endings – That Old Lost Music, A Final Understanding, The Sun’s Secret.

I reserve writing breaks for the difficult, deep dive design & writing work where I need to splash about in spreadsheets and cover the dining room table with index cards. The visitor stories and game endings – which interweave references with each other, with the Librarian origins, and with the deep lore of Hush House, the Secret Histories, pentimenti and numina – are some of the most allusive and self-consciously literary work in the game. They need to be compelling and satisfying for the casual players and they need to reward years of analysis and argumentation by the most dedicated players. So they merit a whole-ass not a half-ass approach.

Fig. 1 — A ‘whole-ass’ approach

And after that, the hay is in the barn. We’ll have a release candidate that we could go with if we absolutely had to, if we didn’t mind the launch being a bit of a shambles. We’ve still got lots of QoL work, bug fixes, audio tuning, performance optimisation and balancing to do so that it won’t be a shambles – and some features it would be nice to add before rather than after launch (‘Mr Kille sends you marrows if you’re nice to him’; ‘Hokobald steals his own book’) – but even if I fall into a deep coma on June 17th, we should still be OK as long as I wake up on August 17th.

Three things I want to say, just in case I do fall into a deep coma!

First: a big thank you to everyone who’s participated in the beta and sent us helpful feedback and bug reports. All I can offer you is the assurance that it’s made a serious and significant difference to the final quality of the game you’ll end up playing: but I can offer you that assurance. We’ve kept a lot of final detail back, partly for canny reasons but partly with beta testers in mind. Everyone was keen to see everything, and I know how tempting it can be to spoil yourself on one too many details. (There will be one last beta phase, but even that will keep some juicy stuff back for launch.).

Second: a big thank you to Lottie, who is going to be embarrassed now she has to put this into a blog post. There’s been a real creative dialogue on this one between writing and art, and as a result, Brancrug and Hush House and the moors above, with all their mists and histories, feel wistfully and transcendently real. I half-forget sometimes that they can’t actually be physically visited.

But we’ll be making the place as visitable as we can very soon now. Just a few more weeks to oil the hinges, clean the bird droppings off the windows, lay fires in the hearths. We wanted Hush House to feel like a home to anyone who’s ever been momentarily tempted by the idea of life as a country librarian or a lighthouse-keeper. If that’s you, then welcome home.

"In Brancrug Village, they tell of Thirza Blake's boast that she crossed an ocean in the Bounds by clinging to a broom of lignum vitae after a shipwreck. The pedant Strathcoyne points out that lignum vitae sinks in water. 'An ocean of mercury,' Thirza replies, and then, to provide a suitable punchline, clouts him on the head with her broom."

See, BOOK OF HOURS is a *fun* game. People hit each other over the head with cleaning accessories! And we named this sprint after Joan the Wad ('wad' being Cornish slang for 'torch'), who's the Cornish pixie queen and a sort of chaotic-good pagan version of Saint Christopher. Depending on who you ask, either Joan looks after those who carry her talisman as they make their journeys or she, er, leads them into a bog. Whatever the truth, researching it taught me that her husband is Jack o' the Lantern, of Halloween pumpkin fame, and it's nice to think of the Piskie king and queen being in some way included in light-heartedly spooky celebrations each year even if nobody knows they're there.

But while piskies play, game devs work. I've been focused on two big art tasks since we last blogged: seasonal art and the skybox, which (as those of you in the beta will know) was until recently a vast blinding square of blue. It's a bit of a cliché for a British couple to get excited about the weather, but BoH's weather is inspired by paper-theatre and I kind of love it!

(A few more examples on the blog.)

There are a few mechanical changes that take place during different weathers (different resources and opportunities), and this only gets deeper with seasons. You'll be able to harvest Lenten Rose from the Scent Garden in spring, for example, but Fragrant Chalice from the same plot in summer. There'll be stickily bountiful bees in the Kitchen Gardens when it's warm, and cornucopic vegetables in the autumn. Most importantly, of course, there'll be a CHARMING CHRISTMASSY ATMOSPHERE when Brancrug Village is coated in snow in wintertime - and I may even add Christmassy bunting up the Grand Ascent. Let's just see how quickly I finish my other art tasks!

Numa is the outlier here. Capricious as fog, it's the season of mists and silence and gently foreboding stars, and it occurs only once every nine seasons, never at quite the same time as before. It has the power to reshape the world you've come to know...

"The smithy fire still glows, but through the window I see a gaunt, eyeless shape working the bellows. There is no sign of Denzil, and I know better than to interrupt this visitor..."

...and offers unique opportunities not available at other times.

"Afterwards I don't remember what work I performed, except in scents and sensations - leaf-mould, a rhythmic musical clicking like melodious castanets, soft blue flame like antique gaslight. And cold; I remember that where we went, it was cold."

So, you know. Pour libations to the Velvet when it comes, enjoy its spooky bounty, and don't spend too long outside.

AK, meanwhile, went on a writer's retreat last week (read: AirBnB'd a pared-back ex-Coastguard lookout and asked me to change his Netflix password).  He powered through a terrifying amount of item descriptions - over 500 of them, I believe - except it wasn't 500 descriptions he had to write. Every object in BOOK OF HOURS needs at least two descriptions, one for when you're casually engaged with them and one when you're really considering them, so he wrote over 1,000 loreful snippets about candlesticks, armoires, buckets of seawater, and a weird fern that looks like it has a face. He ended up with a spreadsheet that looks like this:



And I've seen him cross-referencing everything with various lore docs, artwork, Unity notes and aspects. It's TERRIFYING - sort of like a nice granny sewing an anatomically perfect but Cubist interpretation of a kitten in cross-stitch, listening the entire time to AC/DC played backwards.

He's also been writing room descriptions (which, er, also need two versions). You'll see the first description when you initially discover the room by unlocking one just next to it: this one explains the problem you need to resolve before you can enter it. You'll see the second when the room is unlocked and restored to its former glory, giving you a toothsome morsel of lore. The closest analogue to the effect is the expedition mechanic in Cultist Simulator, where you'll find out a little about the specific vault you're exploring ('The ascent to the cave through the high passes will be dangerous. Whatever waits in the darkness below is probably more dangerous still') and have an opportunity to supply Followers and resources to overcome those obstacles. You'll need help from specialists in BOOK OF HOURS - you're a librarian, not the A Team, Jim - but once you've found the appropriate item or helpful assistant, you're in.

"A thick and freezing murk, like a clinging black mist, roils at floor level. Not theoplasma exactly - the ragged remnants of some chilly Wood-thing? Or a good old-fashioned ghost, decayed to half-elemental energies? Some local will probably know."

We've also been sprucing up the Wisdom Tree (more on that later) and drawing more card art, so I just want to share with you  the truly horrible image for 'Wormwood Dream':



Didn't wanna sleep anyway.



Beta opens again next week with the SOLAR build, including for the first time the ecclesiastical complex dedicated to the Church of the Unconquered Sun, and also the melancholy Gullscry Tower rooms - look out for at least one new friend here. SOLAR will run from Thurs 25th May to Friday 9th June, and will be available for testing for the first time via GOG as well as Steam. Existing beta players will regain access, and we'll send a number of new keys out to new people over the two weeks the beta is live.

We should also have some exciting news for you - particularly people who really want to play the game, but haven't been sent beta keys yet - next week. More on that later. 🤫



We get asked a lot about localisation. The short answers in rough order of importance are: we'd love to do it; it's expensive and difficult; it has to happen post-launch. We haven't yet decided what languages to translate the game into (candidly, this decision depends on how well BOOK OF HOURS does when we release it!) but we have some starting ideas, and I'd love to get some localised store pages live before release to let people know we're thinking of them. So if anyone reading this is fluent in any of the following languages...

• French
  
• Italian
  
• German
  
• Spanish
  
• Russian
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Japanese
  
• Brazilian Portuguese
  

...and is willing to translate about a side of A4 for us, please email [email protected] to let me know! We will be extremely grateful and include you in our prayers to the Sun-in-Rags. 🙏

"Cracktrack was a gift from the light above the world. When Glory touched the first life-motes with this language, they entered the waking world. They were Illuminated."

Big news first: GET HYPE! We can finally reveal that BOOK OF HOURS is launching on Steam and GOG (across Windows, Mac and Linux) on...



This means we can extend the beta and make it a more polished game on release. It's later than we'd hoped, but the feedback so far makes us think we could make this lil' library game really special. We want to take the time to do that. ✌

Now: click below to watch BOOK OF HOURS' first ever trailer!!!11!



Click to watch the STORM trailer!

This game is increasingly like an only slightly poisonous puzzle box of luxury chocolates. Is that a clear enough description? There are chambers and secrets and little jewels to find and lore to discover alongside Mrs Killes' cooking and the sound of rain on a stormy Cornish night. And deadly bon-bons. We originally intended to make a light, agile game like Cultist Simulator, which has tonnes of words in it (200,000+ including DLC, I think?) but hasn't had a good meal in weeks. But over the years BOOK OF HOURS gained a patina, and the game grew roots. It's now probably the 'deepest' game we've ever made, with layers and layers of lore lain on top of one another like resting bones in Mesozoic rock.

One of the key parts of BOOK OF HOURS that we haven't discussed much is the player's ability to influence the Secret Histories - or at least what's canonical in the Histories. The Wisdom Tree is part skill tree, in traditional RPG style ('I kill u with Horomachistry'; 'I am so unskilled in Bosk I cannot even wear this green hat'), but also part branching narrative, where the Librarian gets to decide what's 'true'. AK tweeted a thread on this recently, but to illustrate on example: every skill can be assigned to one of two nodes in the Wisdom Tree. Which one you choose not only increases your understanding of that particular Wisdom, but also makes a lore statement about the nature of the invisible world. Take 'Pentiments & Precursors', which can be assigned to Skolekosophy or Birdsong:



Is Medusa a Name of the Twins, or is she descended from the Carapace Cross? (Preservation suggests: whichever is true, you should be polite.)

AK's also been writing contagions, so our long-touted game description - "Defend your library against storm, fire, theft and the occasional theoplasmic assault" - is now a reality! Horribly, some contagions can spread to OTHER NEARBY THINGS:

"This book is blotched with keeperskin, a luminous fungus that grows in the Wood we see in sleep, and enters the world when a dreamer inhales its spores."

Then there are other types of contamination, which might not start a pandemic, but will make you equally unhappy. Take winkwell, for example, which illuminates parts of reality better left unseen:

"Sometimes when I turn this book to the right angle, I see an eye peering at me from its pages or covers. They close and fade when I leave them in the dark... but light will always bring them out eventually."

Enjoy! 😃😃😃😃

The latest beta build, BARONIAL, went live yesterday, adding all rooms in the central core of Hush House: this includes the ultra-hygge of the Librarian's Quarters; the glittering Hall of Mirrors, with its Pierrot le Fou energy; the homely charm of the Kitchen, where one might indulge in a shnack... Along with more text and functionality, we've also started incorporating a mini-Easter Egg hunt throughout the library, where you can (should you wish!) populate the Grand Ascent with the busts of all significant Barons and Librarians of the House that you'll find scattered through its 107 rooms. What happens if you get the order wrong when you assemble them up the stairs? Just ask poor ol' Abbot Thomas.

If you're signed up to the beta list but didn't get an email yesterday, don't worry! We'll be adding new testers about twice a week, so you have DOUBLE the chances next week of getting in. I understand statistics, I am a artist. DOUBLE.

Speaking of art, all Hush House art is now complete (including seasonal variants, which will be going in soon...), so we wave a sad goodbye to our fabulous Breton freelancer, Adrien. His Gallic personality and an infamous misunderstanding when we asked him to draw 'pigeon holes' - a phrase apparently that does not translate easily into French - will be missed. He ended on a bang, though: check out his version of 'Our Lady Beneath', the post-Roman chapel of the Sisterhood of the Knot in the bowels of the rock beneath Hush House:



(Larger image on the blog.)

I, meanwhile, have descended into trolling AK through aspects (there's one I drew the other day that I don't think he's spotted yet - he will probably make me take it out).



And I'm slowly but inexorably dropping gentle animations through the world, like a poor man's version of the Flowermaker.



Hope you like what you see so far of BOOK OF HOURS and its trailer! We really think it'll be something special that you haven't played before. More beta, more lore, more Secret Histories and more MORE coming over the next very rich four months. Please stand by. ♥

“Westengryre is what the early monks of St Brandan’s called it; that old green-sickness, the raptness of desolation, the terror of the wastes, and it is upon me now. The Wood. The Wood. The Wood…!”

What would a Weather Factory game be if it didn’t try to kill you every so often? The Hours are much more merciful in Brancrug, but the House Without Walls still waits behind the world, and it’s still a dangerous place. Elements of the Soul are vulnerable to maladies if overused, or used unwisely. Chor is drawn into Duendracy by music only you can hear. Wist becomes tangled and Shell-Crossed with pre-human thoughts.. Ereb is vulnerable to Westengryre, and Phost… the HIGHER YOU RISE the MORE YOU SEE. You didn’t think we’d make too easy a game, did you?

On to the beta. Thanks so much for everyone who’s tested so far – it’s so helpful! AK mentioned this in a recent Reddit post, but here’s an easy visual guide to what happens next:



We’ll be removing access to the beta on Monday 17th (you’ll be able to load it after that point, but not get past the title screen), and reopening it on Thursday 27th April with a new expanded build, BARONIAL. We’ve also decided to add testers incrementally over the course of the rest of the beta. A bunch of people will get emails on the 27th, and every week or so – when AK updates Steam with a new build – a few more will find a tasty beta key in their inbox. I know some people were disappointed when they weren’t included in the first tranch of testers and had to wait a month before being in with another chance. This way everyone should be happier, AND we get a steady influx of new people to tell us our UI don’t work. Woo hoo!

Look how nice this one looks! And this is a screenshot, not a mock-up. We’re getting there…

Art-wise I’m astonished to say that we are ONE ROOM AWAY from all (base) art complete. There’s one place left to draw – a triple-sized subterranean chapel of the Sisterhood of the Triple Knot – but we’re looking pretty peachy. I’m now working on bringing it to life with animations (beta testers may have noticed the nice candle animations going in, for example) while Adrien makes a number of seasonal outside art and Important People busts you’ll find around Hush House. Here’s a sampling of what he’s up to. Any guesses on who these busts are?



Right! I’ll leave it here so we can get back to work on the game. More updates soon: beta hopefuls expect an email (maybe) on the 27th, and in two weeks’ time we have something important to share with all of youse. In the interests of getting hype…