The writing in both this game and Book of Hours makes the occult genuinely otherworldly; even mundane activities like reading become uncanny. I couldn't try to explain the lore without sounding appropriately insane. If you look up explanations of proper nouns on the game's wiki, you'll learn more and yet know less than if you just meander through the poetry of it all. That's a feat, and it's worth celebrating. This is very likely one of the top three best written games of all time. That being said, and a design philosophy of obfuscation and toil acknowledged, this really is missing some needed QOL features. Skill cards (Health, Passion, Reason) should auto-stack once they're finished recharging if there's a stack on the playing field rather than constantly making a giant messy pile. There's no reason Dread should grab the newest Contentment on the field rather than the one closest to expiring, it does it so consistently that it can't be an accident, and it makes it harder to play around Dread even when you know how it works. More controversially, given the game's intended design, I also think the work queue should be automatable, as in "continue to perform X job for as long as X skill card exists to fuel it". It wouldn't work for painting, but for the simplest jobs it's just unnecessary wrist strain to keep that loop going over and over and over and over, and it doesn't prove anything about what's being learnt about the game. It really is great, though.
