An old Edge editorial that has stayed with me spoke about what a perfect piece of technology a book is. I think Getting Up had just come out, with its luxuriously muddled menu systems based on the New York subway system. Anyway, compared to picking your way through that, a book is just a treat. Open it up and everything’s right there on the page.
RoguebookPublisher: Abrakam, Nacon, BIGBENDeveloper: AbrakamAvailability: Out now on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and coming to Switch “Spring 2022”
No wonder certain games love books so much. In the past few years we’ve had Trials of Fire, a sublime turn-based battler that uses a book for just about everything, and here’s Roguebook, freshly released on consoles, in which the whole adventure plays out with a bunch of heroes in a book.
I have spent a few mornings with Roguebook and I don’t particularly want to escape. This is a collaboration between the people who made the digital card game Faeria and Richard Garfield, of Magic: The Gathering. It’s a roguelite collectible card game which, in the present day, doesn’t really tell you much. But it’s a genuinely lovely thing – precise and playful by turns. It has chunky fairy tale art, delightful systems and a secretly dashing font – I’ll leave you to decide which one, because annoyingly it uses several. It might be love!
Anyway, there you are stuck in the pages of a magical book. Each chapter plays out on a single sheet, in which you move across hexes – hexes! This game truly has everything – and spend a limited pool of ink revealing more of the map. The aim is to become powerful enough to defeat the page’s boss, at which point you move on.