I recently spent several hours rearranging books, for which I had very little shelf space (the books had spilled over onto bedside tables, window ledges, and the tops of filing cabinets). Most of these books I had not read – indeed, most of them I couldn’t understand – and here I was juggling them all the same, primarily sorting by way of Insta/TikTok-ready color-matching. What books I had read I banished in one room so I wasn’t tempted to read them again (which I had done, accidentally, at least twice over the weekend); there is benefit from rereading a book, of course, but my to-read list was getting out of control because every time I entered a room I was faced with another bounty of colorfully wrapped packages containing yet more books.
There are dozens of rooms in this house, stretching ever westward toward the sea, piled high into spinnerets and – I think – descending far below me to depths that I cannot fathom. At the time, running from shelf to shelf in a desperate attempt to find order, I had only been inside thirteen of these rooms. The most recent, helpfully marked ‘Kitty’s pride,’ was packed with instruments I did not know how to play but was, thankfully, given my then-current task, devoid of books. I feared that to broach the room beyond the music room (the ‘Rose-Haunted Hall’) I must first educate the local midwife’s assistant so she could help me, in her small way, to unlock the door.
The weather wasn’t right for such an education – it had been sunny for what felt like weeks – and there had been no helpful rumors at The Sweet Bones, the pub across the bridge in Brancrug Village. I wondered if perhaps I could remember a certain song, or if one of the paintings hanging in the Entrance Hall might illuminate my thinking in such a way that I could describe my needs to the midwife’s assistant. So far, none of the books had been able to teach me exactly the things I thought I needed to know.
I had, at this point, been the librarian at Hush House for several months. I had seen seasons change from the panoramic vista of the observatory windows. Patrons had come several times, and while I scrambled to find them the books they might need, one or two had departed empty-handed and unhappy.
It often felt as if I had made no progress in restoring the library to its former glory. The Tree of Wisdom remained unilluminated; I understood only bare snippets of the secret history.
This is the burden of Hush House.
Book of Hours is not a narrative game in form or function; my experiences above were not related to me in any direct way. There has been no first-person perspective of Hush House, no cutscenes relaying conversations between my character and the drunks at the pub, no scene-setting prologues written out.
The game spits the player out on a sort of game board like an obscured playmat, marked St. Brandan’s Cove. In the player’s inventory – a set of featureless black rectangles at the top left of the screen – is an unknown bundle in the shape of an illustrated card. No mechanics are explained to the player; there is no wordy tutorial, no helpful pop-ups. An uninspired player might never discover the hidden workings of Book of Hours, and might never leave that beach.
This is the core dynamic between player and Book of Hours. The workings of the game lie obscured, discoverable only by the player’s persistent tinkering. The package in the player’s inventory must be considered, both in reality and in the game; there is a Consider mechanic into which the package card must be placed. A ticking clock then appears. Eventually, the Consider machine spits out a few more cards – the contents of the package, each with sparse descriptions that only hint at their purpose.
This card and clock mechanic is the game’s lone toolset; it governs every action the player makes as they venture into the village and Hush House beyond. Reading books, having conversations, hiring help — all of these are facilitated by inserting the right cards into the right spaces and letting the clock tick down.
Like developer Weather Factory’s previous game, Cultist Simulator, the game is often frustratingly obtuse; in that game, the player is presented only with a blank tabletop. Any meaning or understanding given to the player’s actions must be ascribed by the player themselves. A narrative in Book of Hours might be uncovered only by the player’s own creative interpretation of those ticking clocks, those sparsely described cards and actions. No goal is made readily apparent.
That obfuscation is both mechanically and thematically intentional. Both Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours are games about the uncovering of Lovecraftian mystery, the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge [that] will open up such terrifying vistas of reality” (as Lovecraft writes in The Call of Cthulhu). The player, like all occult detectives and cult aspirants, begins blind to possibility; the denseness of the games’ workings serves to illustrate the dense fog of ignorance.
Book of Hours alleviates some of this opaqueness through its illustrative play map: the player understands their purpose by laying eyes on the long stretch of Hush House, a grid of blank spaces waiting to be illuminated. The narrative is slightly more emphasized – you understand your character’s position as librarian and you understand a librarian’s role – but it is Hush House, its empty rooms, and the endless mystery of the books one finds there that compel the player forward.
Ah, the books. Within those books lies every potential means of progressing the game: using initially scarce resources to crack the meaning of a book, the player unlocks ‘lesson’ cards. By Considering ‘lesson’ cards, the player unlocks ‘skill’ cards; by committing those ‘skills’ to a skill tree, the player unlocks permanent resources. The problem, however, is that these books – uncovered by random sequence as you unlock rooms – often have mysteries leaps and bounds above your ability to understand until much later in the game.
The more rooms you open, the more books you discover; the more books you read, the more lessons you learn; the more lessons you learn, the more books you can read and rooms you can enter.
Dazzlingly, every one of these books actually contains snippets of flavor text uncovering the massively complicated mythology of these two games, written as compulsively by their game designer as the player will be compelled to read them (Book of Hours contains at least 170,000 words, roughly equivalent to a 675-page novel).
Book of Hours is a deeply considered and constructed game, and this makes it a deeply rich and satisfying experience to play – if, of course, you are the type of player who is willing to suffer frustration in exchange for reward. It is a game dense with content, even if sometimes its content is equally supplied by the player’s imaginings. Already hours and hours in, I’ve barely scratched the surface of its mysteries and intricacies. Hush House remains intriguingly closed to me — and, one hopes, to the next librarian to walk its empty halls.
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