Book of Demons

Book of Demons is a hack-and-slash RPG from Thing Trunk that strips the genre down to something surprisingly deliberate. Set in the Paperverse, a world that looks like it was assembled from folded paper and pop-up book illustrations, you descend into the dungeons beneath the Old Cathedral to fight your way toward the Archdemon. The visual style is immediately arresting and holds up across the whole campaign. It is not just decoration either. The paper aesthetic actually informs the way enemies, items, and environments feel, giving the whole thing a slightly eerie fairy-tale tension that keeps the atmosphere from ever feeling generic. The core hook that separates this from a Diablo clone is the card system. Instead of conventional weapon slots and gear drops, you collect and equip magic cards that define your abilities, buffs, and passive traits. Three classes are available: the Warrior, the Rogue, and the Mage. Each class has its own card pool, which means build variety across playthroughs is real and not cosmetic. The Warrior leans on armor and direct-damage cards, the Rogue throws daggers and applies debuffs, and the Mage welds elemental spells into volatile combinations. At hour 40 you are still finding cards that reframe how your deck functions, which is a genuine compliment. Movement is locked to a path-based system rather than free roaming, so combat becomes about timing card plays and managing resources rather than kiting around an open arena. Some players will find this limiting. I found it refreshing because it forces actual decision-making rather than dodge-rolling your way out of every situation. The other headline feature is Flexiscope, the system that lets you set how long each dungeon run will take before you start. You choose a playtime estimate and the game dynamically adjusts dungeon length to fit. This is genuinely useful for people who play in short windows, and it means the game respects your time in a way most ARPGs do not even pretend to. It does blunt the sense of discovery a little. When you know the dungeon ends in 20 minutes, some of the tension drains. But for a game explicitly designed around casual accessibility alongside deeper build play, the trade-off is reasonable. Where Book of Demons falls short is in narrative depth. The story is thin, the characters outside the main three classes are mostly backdrop, and the writing does not reward second reads the way the mechanical systems reward second playthroughs. If you come in hoping for dialogue trees, faction politics, or a world that feels populated by people with inner lives, you will be disappointed. The Paperverse has lore and charm, but it sits at the surface. The Archdemon is a villain you fight rather than one you learn to hate or understand. For an RPG specialist who cares about whether choices matter beyond stat allocation, that is a real limitation worth naming. That said, the gameplay loop is tight, the card-building has enough depth to carry multiple class runs, and the polish level for an indie title from a small studio is genuinely impressive. The 91% positive Steam rating reflects a playerbase that knows what it signed up for and found that the game delivered on it. The Metacritic score of 72 is fair but undersells how satisfying the core loop feels once you have a proper deck running. Book of Demons is for players who want ARPG mechanics in a shorter, more controlled format, and who do not mind trading narrative complexity for mechanical clarity.

Monika · Scout Team

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