Book of Demons is a pretty neat roguelike heavily inspired by Diablo 1 with a paper / card aesthetic that I really enjoyed where you must go to the bowels of a dungeon to defeat a big devil. Choosing from three classes with a bevy of items and skills, you click away to walk on predefined paths, dodge attacks, perform small minigame-like tasks to overcome enemies, come back to town to cash in rewards, and restart that loop until the end.
Moving and attacking in this game are the most peculiar things; you move on isometric paths through a dungeon and your character is more or less on rails and you just decide if you go forward, backwards or which direction you pick at an interesection. You attack automatically, but you can also manually increase your attack speed, use skills mapped to cards you have equipped by pressing keyboard shortcuts, click on healing wells, gold, pots, bookcases and chests to find resources. I gotta say that as the game progressed and enemies got more complicated, the basic acts of moving around and attacking became pretty chaotic at times, but I managed.
While you get cards that can be actively used, on a cooldown, to shoot ice shards, summon a golem or do a dash attack, you also get cards that passively improve your characteristics, like health regeneration, a chance to shoot fireballs when you attack, blocking projectiles or ignoring dangerous terrain. These cards reduce your max mana when equipped, and can be upgraded using runes or found in different rarities, thus making the decision whether you can mana or health on level up kinda interesting. Rewards you don’t choose can be bought in town, but the price increases each time you do it, so it’s a risk/reward situation.
My biggest annoyance with the game comes in the form of the many minigame-like activities you have to perform constantly. You have to click on small shields on enemies to break them, if you get stunned you have to move your mouse around to catch the stars spinning around your character’s head, poison damage is mitigated by clicking on the poison icon above your health globe, some foes mess up your cards and you gotta move them around, it’s a bit perplexing because it’s not really based on your stats or anything, you just gotta do the minigame, and it can get really hectic.
Ultimately I had a good old time with Book of Demons, it felt good to play and building a really strong character with a lot of synergizing skills and effects was fun!
