Book of Hours News

"Before gods arose from blood, before ever ape stood upright, this was the language heard in the House of the Sun...”

All 200,000 words of BOOK OF HOURS are now available in Simplified Chinese and Russian! (Japanese language is coming a little later.) We’ve tried to capture the poetry of the original English as much as possible, so whatever language you choose, we hope it’s a joy to play.



Firstly, make sure you’ve updated the game to the latest version. BOOK OF HOURS should then automatically load in your default language (so if you browse Steam in Simplified Chinese, the game should automatically display in Simplified Chinese). If it doesn’t, just select the language you want from the ‘Languages’ drop-down menu on the title screen. We strongly recommend - we urge you with a desperate passion - to start a new game after switching languages. It might bork your game if you don’t!

If you encounter any bugs (particularly language bugs, like typos or translations that don’t make sense) please email [email protected] and let us know. Some things might be a stylistic choice on behalf of our excellent localisers, but we want to make these the best they can be. All feedback is welcome.

Please note that our major expansion, HOUSE OF LIGHT, launches next month on Thursday 26th September. It’s huge - including hundreds of new recipes, Visitor interactions, and more - so it will not be playable in Russian or Simplified Chinese on launch day. We’ll release Russian and Simplified Chinese for HOUSE OF LIGHT as soon as it’s humanly possible to translate it. Thank you for being patient with us while we make it happen!

If you like BOOK OF HOURS, please leave us a nice review and tell your friends about it. It’s really hard getting the word out to people we can’t speak to directly, so help us spread the melancholy joy of Brancrug by using the enviable language skills we don’t have. Thank you! ♥

"Facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away."
— Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)

Facts are the bricks of life, but they need a few licks of paint before you want to look at them. Mr Gradgrind of Hard Times said: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else." And he turned out to be the villain of the piece! So today I am giving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.



You all know that HOUSE OF LIGHT is launching on Thursday 26th September at 6PM BST. I can now confirm that it will cost $14.99 / £12.99 / €13.99 with a 10% launch discount in the first week of sale (except if you're a Perpetual Edition owner, in which case it's free). We'll also be adding a new BOOK OF HOURS: Anthology Edition bundle, just like Cultist Simulator, which includes the base game, the soundtrack and HOUSE OF LIGHT with a 15%-off-everything discount (making it about $43.32 / £35.67 / €41.21 in total). This should make it easy for first-time buyers to get the definitive edition of the game with one click, and for existing fans to force gentle occult librarianship on all their friends by buying it as a gift for someone else.



AK has already mentioned this in a few places, but it's worth reiterating that HOUSE OF LIGHT is roughly comparable in size to all Cultist's DLCs wrapped up in one. Cultist had lots of smaller expansions, but we tried something different with BOOK OF HOURS and spent much longer making one really chunky expansion rather than lots of little pieces. So just in case anyone was worried about the value of Perpetual Edition dropping, it hasn't! It's all just coming at once this time.

Depending on how HOUSE OF LIGHT goes, and how pre-production on our Mysterious Game Three goes, we'll make a decision in the first half of 2025 about whether we come back to BOOK OF HOURS and release additional expansions like HOUSE OF HUES. More on that as/when we have updates.



Now, for some long-awaited news...



It finally has a release date! That release date is:

[h2]🎴🎃🦇 HALLOWEEN 🦇🎃🎴
(Thursday 31st October 2024)[/h2]



We'll be releasing it on our Etsy shop at 6PM GMT, it'll cost £70 + shipping, and we'll be starting with 500 signed, limited edition copies. Every deck comes with a velvet tarot bag and quick start guide, but the first 500 decks will also contain a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by 'the artist'. Once these are gone, they're gone - so if the Tarot of the Hours and the Lady Afterwards launches are anything to go by, I'd suggest camping out on the Etsy shop at this time on Halloween and grabbing a copy while they're still there.

If you miss out on the first 500, don't worry. Like we did with the Tarot of the Hours - to make sure everyone in all time zones had a fair chance of getting a deck - we'll release another 500 Lucid Tarots over November / December. If we sell out, we'll restock for 2025. So everyone who wants a deck will be able to get one - we just have to take it slow so I (and my mum and dad, who have been unceremoniously roped in for packing duty) can manage demand.

Right. See you on the other side of Simplified Chinese and Russian release, which is happening next week on Thursday 29th August. Wish us luck!

* A fix specifically for the logo not changing when you switched specifically from Chinese to Russian in the menu.
* Another fix for the bug the logo fix caused, where all buildings in Brancrug looked like the Sweet Bones.

(and finally the bookshelf labelling system supports Chinese characters)

ladies germs and others, hello!

Most of this patch is prep work for HOUSE OF LIGHT (out next month) and for Russian and Chinese localisation (out next week, available now if you add loctest=1 to your config.ini). But some of it will interest those of you who (a) exist, like me, in the narrow span of now (b) also like me don't speak Russian or Chinese.

There are now hotkeys for expand/contract trays - F1-F4 by default

A few months back a very polite lady with arthritis wrote to me and asked if I could add this, so once I'd mostly wrapped HOUSE OF LIGHT, I found some time to do it. And I'm glad - I hadn't realised how much difference it makes even to those of us without especially disabled fingers.

SHIFT-TAB (or SHIFT-other-assigned-sort-key) now undoes card sorting

Likewise. That Undo button really is titchy.

Apples are sometimes found on the moor

So once HOUSE OF LIGHT is out, you can make Apple as well as Mushroom Meringue. yw. Although also once you have HoL, Timothy will sometimes bring apples to dinner from the Rectory orchard, as a thank you gift. (Mr Kille is your man for marrows.)

Raw pheasant and beef can now be fed to your cat (or other carnivorous pet). Cats, and vipers, now drink milk

And carnivores eat pilchards and mackerel and things. This was absurdly hard to do, because of knots about Sustenance, Raw, Ingredients, Remains that I'd tied myself in, and may have quirks.

The Bronze Knife is now a Tool

The main reason I put this unfathomable Thirzan athame in the game is to make sandwiches, so I forgot to add the tool aspect.

Typewriters, and the Chronsicord, can now be used as Inks - and Typewriters won't be exhausted.

Of course typewriters have much lower Aspect levels than most inks. It's balanced out rather nicely.

Numerous fixes for Russian and Chinese loc. ...like, settings tooltips now expand dowwards and no longer uses small caps, for intricate font reasons...and, like, tweaking card sorting order so we can support multiple alphabets! Let me know at support@ about any anomalies.

So many. And you'll probably see more bullet points in LEVINSEN and MATILDA saying 'still more loc fixes, also Japanese'

ESC now leaves photo / HUD hidden mode

I only put photo mode in originally when we were getting Trailer Farm to make our trailer, and they wanted UI-less screenshots. I'd forgotten it was there. But a helpful soul pointed out that if you hit F11 without knowing what you'd hit, the experience could be traumatic.

Scrolling in the Wisdom Tree now disabled while you have Settings open. Finally set the Wisdom Tree to right-click-drag only. (I didn't realise left-click-drag even worked, and it didn't work well, so it confused people.)

Next game (you read the teasers about the next game, didn't you?) will be a bit less experimental, so we'll make up less of the UI as we go along.

Thanks all! Enjoy your F1-F4ing.