An interesting art style and decent music are about all this game has going for it. Unbalanced audio, so-so voice acting, weird scaling of various art assets. The game does have a hint system which I always appreciate in a point-and-click game. I used it once and managed to figure out the puzzle, but the hint I was given was still not very intuitive. The demo took me a total of 25 minutes to complete and did not in any way entice me to revisit the game upon its full release.
I really enjoyed the Potion Craft demo. It provides a perfect slice of gameplay and gives you a real taste of the game. There is even an “About full version” main menu item you can check out if you’re curious what the development team is planning to add to the full release. This game does a lot of things right. The artwork is unique with a soothing palette, and reminds me of a mix of block prints and ancient illuminated manuscripts. The tutorial was well-written and thorough and it encouraged exploration and experimentation. There was a variety of gameplay mechanics introduced--discovering new potions being my favorite system--and all of them worked well together. Having the ability to customize the bottles and labels of the potions you create was a nice touch. On the other hand, there are plenty of QOL improvements that could be implemented (e.g. - better ways to sort ingredients), grinding herbs needs to be more precise, the reputation system needs to be explained somewhere so it feels less random, extra dialogue options with merchants should be fleshed out so the player can realistically engage with them even if they aren't planning on purchasing items from them. Hopefully some of these issues will be addressed in the final game, but regardless Potion Craft is promising and I look forward to checking out the final game!
Black Book appears to be a deck builder primarily, and while I don’t have a lot of experience with this genre, I didn’t see anything novel in the gameplay. Some ultimately familiar mechanics were explained poorly or not at all and were only understood after experimenting--this was only a problem due to the contrast of how thoroughly other mechanics were explained. The game’s art style really worked for me in the somewhat-abstract environment art and even with the fantastical beasts I encountered, but not so much when it came to human-presenting characters. It didn’t take long to notice the reuse of art assets, i.e. - visually identical forest backdrops appearing shortly after being used in a location I had recently left--I could have probably gotten past this if the repetition hadn’t been obvious so quickly. I encountered a few bugs during the hour and a half I played. I found multiple instances of missing collisions with solid objects and there were many moments when I was exploring where I would face Vasilisa towards an object of interest and upon clicking on the object to learn more, she would run away and then suddenly stop, looking away from the object being “observed.” There are so many basic mechanics that I’ve read about in reviews of the full game that are completely unreachable in the demo, e.g. - at the end of the demo you’ve enlisted your first _chort_ (a demonic familiar) but you never get to see what it actually means to have a chort. I can’t help but wonder if my overall impression of the game would have ended up in a more positive place if I had gotten a better taste for what the gameplay is like. All of these issues would have been easy to shrug off and move past if they had happened in isolation but having them all piled together in one demo was too much. In the end, I decided that if what I played in the demo was an accurate representation of what to expect in the full version of Black Book, the game is not for me.
