BOOK OF HOURS IS OUT NOW!
“BOOKS ARE THE MEMORY WHICH DOES NOT DIE.”
(inscribed in five languages over the gate of Hush House)
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but: BOOK OF HOURS is OUT NOW on Steam and GOG! 😱😱😱😱
If you like what you see, leave us a review. Our games tend towards the weird and inexplicable, and it’s incredibly helpful to let other gamers know that we’ve not just, like, knitted a sock and drawn a face on it or something. Help unweird and explicate us! As much as is possible. ♥
After Cultist Simulator, we wanted to set our next game in the same universe – but AK felt bad that he’d made another game about eating people and bringing the apocalypse, and he wanted to write something kinder. Fast forward four years and here we are, in the soft golden glow of a deep auburn game about managing an occult library, of organising things carefully and thoughtfully, of being left alone in a beautiful Gormenghastian abbey to light candles and read books and walk the parapets, where every so often someone drops by to ask you something or give you a book – and then they go away again. BOOK OF HOURS: the introvert’s dream!
I thought you might be interested in some fragments of development history. You might recognise some things that evolved into the game we’ve just released, and others that (rightly) were left by the wayside because for the love of god how was that UI ever going to work? Here’s a little sample:
Early sketches for our hero art:
Some of the earliest design notes:
The first draft layout of Hush House:
Early Hush House design:
Some early prototypes of what BoH‘s art might look like:
Our ‘porthole’ phase:
We wanted to build something that had the crunchy recipe-based mechanics of Cultist Sim but was a welcoming place, somewhere you could go just to be on your own even if you weren’t working to achieve anything: a sun-dappled hammock; a candle-lit nook; a secret walled garden whose only key is yours. BOOK OF HOURS will not be for everyone, but I hope everyone can feel the love we poured in radiating from the worn stones of Hush House, the wave-weathered rocks around Crowcross Sands, the lamp-lit leaded-glass windows of the Sweet Bones, and the purr of the well-fed cat you brought in from the cold.
The mellifluous Systemchalk is broadcasting BOOK OF HOURS live on the Steam page, if you’d like to see the game in action. Alternatively, join us at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT for an AMA on r/Gaming (live here!), or in a live interview on GOG’s Twitch stream tomorrow at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT. Thank you so much for reading, and if you decide to pick up BOOK OF HOURS this week, may the Hours look kindly on your deeds.
Love, Lottie & Alexis
Woo, congratulations!
Just want to offer a huge, heartfelt, well-deserved “CONGRATULATIONS!”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play the game.
Big shout out to BoH! I played 4 hours today and it’s been satisfying all along. Hope to join your localization team as well.
Any plans for an Android version? Cultist sim was brilliant on long train journeys on my tablet.
Lottie will be talking to mobile publishers, so hopefully!
Buy it yesterday and i am playing it today. Really enjoying it. After so much Cultist Simulator new mysteries to uncover and marvels to behold are very welcome. I can have some peace, some books and don’t need to worry for the Bureau isn’t trailing me, Mr Alden isn’t yet again telling me to redo stuff and, even if i haven’t advanced that far in the game, no corpse is making the cupboard smell funny. Gonna enjoy it for hours, if not for the Hours. Thanks for the game and the hard work you have put on it. Have my money with the thanks too, well deserved for a great work. Have some well earned rest on weekend and congrats on the successful release 🙂
Congratulations ! I’m so happy to dive back into the mechanics and lore !
Also I adopted a stray cat, and the purrs are just perfect – I just know you guys recorded Chi !
I wish that were true! But that’s the work of Dave from Soundcuts (or his cat). We should probably put some genuine Chi sounds in though, now you mention it
Congrats! I thought you were doing a small game. Totally didn’t expect it to be Cultist Simulator 2.0.
>! I thought you were doing a small game
SO DID I
Was this removed from GoG? I can’t find it on their site.
I don’t know if this is a stupid question, but is there any chance of this being released for Switch?
Not remotely a stupid question. We’re planning to do what we did with Cultist, which is partner with a mobile publisher who can also do a Switch port, but it takes a while to sort out.