Book of Hours News

"The Hours are not all-knowing. Perhaps in truth we should not call them gods..."

What secrets lurk in old grimoires? What histories lie beneath Hush House? What's true about the invisible world, and what legacy will you forge with your hard-won numina? It's finally time to share BOOK OF HOURS' launch trailer, the first step across the threshold for all Librarians. Hopefully this gives everyone an appealing taste of the game, from hardcore Cultist Simulator fans (here's looking at you, Apostle Entheates) to people who've never heard of the Secret Histories. Watch below, share it around and let us know what you think! 🤫

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
So shiny! Much heart-feels! Wow!

Now, onto development. Our beta period is now officially over, so a serious thank you to everyone who participated in any of them over the last few months. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful, and AK's full-time job at the moment is tweaking the game based on what we're hearing from players. He only implements a few suggestions - as with all Kennedy games, BOOK OF HOURS is highly distinctive and therefore divisive - but he really does read and think about every email we receive. AK + Feedback in the 'Consider' verb = Better Game + Need of Gin...?



As a result of everyone's hard work, I've finally been able to take some shiny new screenshots (check 'em out on the Steam page if you haven't seen them yet), and have been feverishly finishing off all remaining Aspects, Elements and Things, with some help from veteran element artists Clockwork Cuckoo.



Most importantly, we now have proper states for all pets. Like the Wild, Tame and HONGRY cat below:



AK, meanwhile, has been working flat out on polishing the game post-beta. This mostly means bringing the last 20% of Hush House to life (that's right: the caves under the House remain unexplored until launch), zillions of technical bugs like 'this runs at 3FPS on my potato', 'this runs at 10FPS on my laptop' and 'are you trolling us with the phonograph, where the hell is it'. Having finally had the time to play the game myself, oh my Hours am I sorry I didn't put in more wall art / comfort / thing slots for you all to put things down! I love the idea in theory of picking up a snake and then never, ever being able to put it down, but in reality it's less fun. So... I'm working on that! But let me hand over to AK for one moment...

★★★

In Sheri S. Tepper's Sideshow, there's a recurring children's story that has always stayed with me. I re-read it today, and it sounds oddly relevant in some expected and unexpected ways.

"And so, sustained by this ambition, he went higher and higher yet, gray stone and gray cliff and gray rain falling, year after year, until he came at last to the place the swallows danced in the air above the bottomless void..."

Back in 2021, Lottie and I described BOOK OF HOURS as a game of 'peace, melancholy, satisfaction and curiosity'. If you've followed our work, you'll know that we're theme-first; you might also know that I have a thing about there always being an core, understated theme that the others orbit like an invisible sun. In BOOK OF HOURS, this understated theme is loneliness.

"When they saw him, they stopped dancing to perch beside him on the stone, and when he saw them there, silver and black, beautiful as a night lit with stars, he was possessed once again by a great longing, and he told them of his desire for wings. “‘Perhaps you may have wings, but you must give up your shell,’ they cried..."

One of the things they tell you in children's books is that if you're a loner, but gifted, or virtuous, or interesting, you will have a happy ending. This much is often true. But many children's books end with the loner getting a medal, or a big parade, or a special hat, while everyone cheers. This is not, in my experience, how it generally works.

"And even as they told him he might have wings, he seemed to hear in their voices some of the carelessness he had heard in the voice of the owl and the bat and the bullfrog, who had told him where to go without telling him the dangers of the way. He heard them rightly, for the winged gods have a divine indifference toward those who seek flight. They will not entice and they will not promise and they will not make the way easy, for those who wish to soar must do so out of their heart’s desire and their mind’s consent and not for any other reason..."

The Librarian of Hush House has left the world behind. Visitors will pass like seasons into their life and out of it, and the Librarian may never see them again, let alone know the end of their stories. The Librarian will live, die, and leave something for whoever might come after. This is of course what all of us do, all our lives. Much is taken, but much abides.

"And the turtle struggled with himself, wanting wings but not wanting wings, for if he had wings, they told him, he would no longer be interested in going back to the pond to tell the creatures there of his journey—that comfortable telling, the anticipation of which had been, perhaps, more important to him than the wings themselves. So, he struggled, wanting and not wanting …"

I don't think anyone will enjoy BOOK OF HOURS if they have never been lonely. I hope that people who've never been lonely will still like the game. But, honestly, I don't know if there's anyone in the world like that.

★★★

.........I always come across as a bit of a cheesepuff (light; dusted; non-profound) after I let AK write anything, so I shall epilogue succinctly. We've a bunch of stuff coming between now and actual release, including streamer access, social countdowns, a launch-day AMA on r/Games and a gameplay-focused final video. It should all be terribly exciting and I will be appealing to YOU good souls to help us, if you like, make BOOK OF HOURS' release as big as a game about being left alone to read quietly in a library can possibly be. Thank you for sticking with us so far - you must now enjoy launch on our behalf while we run around with our hair on fire saying terribly British things like 'ah, I am a-pother' and 'halp'. Stay tuned.

And for our final 'dog on a skateboard' story, I leave you with news that everybody's favourite Weary Detective from Cultist Simulator has been working hard, working out and has duly received a much-deserved promotion. Good job, Douglas! That means you get a cooler hat. ♥

"Detective-Illuminate of the Suppression Bureau. A stoic, but weary, fellow. His dearest wish is to move to Chingford and grow roses. But the buggers won't let him retire."

"Write a truth in a book that no-one reads. Then drop dead. No-one knows what you wrote. Unless the truth is numen."

We've just emailed a bunch of new and existing testers to confirm the release of our final and most lore-heavy beta, NOCTURNAL. Unless we run into significant bugs we're not expecting, this beta will only run for one week (we'll remove access from everyone on Monday 24th July), and will be BOOK OF HOURS' last beta release. Get your early access while stocks last!

Having a beta build live is fantastic for catching issues but adds a support and development burden to us for the duration. So we want a short sharp pinch of testing to make sure the game's still holding up okay, then focused dev time in the run up to launch so we can get stuck into final content passes, technical optimisations and all the little baubles that make an inanimate fir tree you've stuck in a pot into a magical Christmas tree.



LOADS. Everything but the underground 'Dawn' area is available to visit. Most of the content, grace notes, polish, bug fixing, achievements (!), most of the endings (just not the ones that need access to the underground caves)... you name it, there's probably some of it in there.



Well, the teeny LAUNCH will happen on LAUNCH DAY which as I'm sure you all know is THURSDAY 17th AUGUST. Did I mention I'd love you to burn this into your memories and those of everyone else you know? Thank you kindly.

I'll probably post a final update on game dev progress next week, when we hit our internal 'release candidate' milestone, and we'll have some pre-launch reveals over the course of the next month. For now, I leave you with news that we recently completed all our Numen cards - 'truths so powerful that they, tentatively, believe themselves' - and there is one I particularly want you to meet:

"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. 🙏