While visiting EGX over the weekend, there have been quite a lot of indie video games to be taking part in, however none impressed me fairly like Book of Abominations. This demo solid by simply two builders at Magination Games left an enduring impression on me, with the Pokemon clone feeling like a cautious combination of Stardew Valley’s artwork fashion, Pokemon’s battling mechanics and music, and the devilish nature of Lovecraft’s works multi functional.
In the brief demo that I performed, you get up in your house which is adorned with books and rusting furnishings, and it instantly felt as if I’d woken up in my farmhouse in Stardew Valley. Albeit, in a unique dimension. You depart your house and should battle it out with some slime, the place you’re taught how battling and seize mechanics work.
Although Book of Abominations is clearly impressed by Pokemon, the developer has nonetheless tried to make issues unique. Your assaults are, effectively, your assaults, however quite than whipping out potions and sweet in your pocket monsters, you’re utilizing spells and tomes to maintain them combating match. And as a substitute of slinging PokeBalls at enemies to tame them, you’ll have to finish a seize spell over a number of turns – with out dying or killing the hostile monster – earlier than lastly ending off the struggle and amassing them for your self.
There’s additionally no PP in relation to utilizing assaults. Instead, sure assaults have cooldowns over a number of turns, so you need to be very strategic – and cautious – about once you use your strikes, and who you employ them on.
After slightly exploring, capturing some slime and killing some zombie-like creatures, you run into Miasmoth, The Befouled and its minions. It’s nearly offered as a Dark Souls struggle in a Pokemon-sized world, with the large HP bar for the creature taking on the width of the display screen. With your measly however aggressive creatures, it’s actually doable to beat this cryptid to a pulp, however that’s one thing I didn’t fairly handle to do throughout my time taking part in the Book of Abominations demo.
The developer of Book of Abominations got here up with the concept for the sport as one thing that it wished to play, and figured that different individuals would need to play, too. And they’re not mistaken. While there’s loads of horror-themed mods for Pokemon on the market, and a few spectacular Pokemon clones, there’s nothing fairly like what this pair of builders are getting down to do. So a lot so, that the duo growing the sport – Magination Games – took residence the Abertay University’s DARE Academy Award for its distinctive concepts and unbelievable efforts executing them.
Rather than amassing cute pocket monsters that bear resemblances to animals, autos, and even home goods (considering of you, Sinistea), Book of Abominations has you battling out with spell-casting cryptids, with an artwork and audio-style that hails again to the early Pokemon video games on GameBoy and Nintendo DS. It’s one thing that I’d argue there’s positively a niche available in the market for, and the kind of recreation that us horror-loving Pokemon followers need and want.
With Book of Abominations being the work of simply two individuals, the sport isn’t anticipated to be accomplished anytime quickly, sadly. Magination Games has shared that it may possibly see the sport arriving in 4-5 years time, however it’s seeking to develop its crew and hopefully velocity up growth, with all being effectively.
You can maintain updated with the event of Book of Abominations over on the video games Twitter.
