Letting the Player Learn: Weather Factory and Difficulty as Flavor

Players are often given the rules of a game right out of the gate. It is only natural, as the rules are what allow the player to perform actions upon the game and are what inform how the gameplay progresses. Rules serve as a power that the player must contend with, yet what happens when these rules are not stated? What effect does this have on the game’s feel and impact? By diving into this nebulous realm, the studio, Weather Factory, has created a wholly unique experience with their game, the occult librarian simulator, Book of Hours.

Book of Hours brands itself as a narrative crafting RPG, yet it lacks the stereotypical components of the compounded genre. The game begins simply, the player is told that they washed up on a beach and are given a card representing a journal that washed up with them, along with some weirdly named “elements of the soul”. They are prompted to find help, and that’s it. There are no tutorials, and the guides will say more about the setting than actually provide any help. The player is expected to find their way from here on out. Yet even with its obscured nature, learning the game is not an impossible task. Being based on board and card games, the game involves dragging items and cards onto other items and some locations, and attempting to unlock a combination that will unlock something else. This all takes place on a single screen showing the countless rooms of the library. The player is eventually tasked with restoring a nearby village, making it easy to eventually familiarize themselves with what goes where. After an initial puzzle of accessing the bridge to the library, the player is given the main loop of the game. The player must restore rooms of the library in order to learn more, in order to accomplish a goal that involves needing a high number of points in a specific stat. This requires that the player slowly learns and uncover how everything works.

An attempt to briefly explain the game’s mechanics is hampered by how intertwined everything is and the massive list of exceptions. The game’s stats are called principles, of which there are thirteen, and can be considered the core components of the game. Each of the nine “elements of the soul” is given two principles, with one being one point stronger than the other, except for the only normally named element, Health, which has three principles. Books have a set principle and a level that the player must beat in order to be read. Once a book is read, the game gives the player memories, single-use cards with principles that, outside of exceptions, will expire at the end of the day, and lessons, a type of card with two principles that can be turned into a skill with the same principles or used in the same manner as memories. The number of lessons given correlates to the difficulty of the book, and extras that already have a learned skill can be used to level up the skill in conjunction with memories with matching principles. Skill can be placed into an overly esoteric skill tree with 9 separate branches, with each skill being able to be placed into two branches, which gives more elements. Skills can also be used at workstations with matching aspects to craft objects and memories, with there being three recipes for the two principles attached to the skill. Every object also has its own principles and can be used to help with other tasks. These are simply the rules that apply at all times; the game is a convoluted tapestry of webs and interactions.

Normally, such an overtly complicated and esoteric system would be too much for a standard player to learn and work within. But, as Book of Hours hides its mechanics for the player to uncover, the player picks up how it all works at a much slower pace than a regular game, making the system surprisingly digestible. The player works at their own pace, taking down notes on the best way to progress, and chooses when to start working in more mechanics into their gameplay. The player studies, notes down, and organizes what they find in order to study, note down, and organize even more. The game creates a perfect framing for its goal of having the player feel like a librarian. Yet the mystery is not the only aspect that creates this feeling, as Weather Factory’s two other games demonstrate.

The studio’s first game is Book of Hours’ predecessor, Cultist Simulator, and is, contrary to its title, another card-based RPG that keeps its complex and interwoven mechanics hidden. The game tasks the player with starting a cult, and in order to do so, they must balance a number of different mechanics. Unlike its successor, however, its lack of an explanation for its rules creates a stressful game where the player has to learn and adapt on the fly or else fail. It is a brutal game that requires a large number of retries, as the player can lose to a mechanic they just discovered. This excels at creating an atmosphere of dread and paranoia, perfectly fitting the game’s framing, yet the game still feels like other tense horror roguelikes. Weather Factory’s second game is noticeably different, and not just due to its medium. The Lady Afterwards is a hybrid tabletop RPG and mystery game that, unlike the studio’s other two games, follows a set path and storyline. Even with its physical nature and its linearity, however, there are still hidden mechanics that the players must uncover. One of the primary mechanics of the custom tabletop RPG system comes from the use of a deck of tarot cards, which are drawn at the beginning of a session and can affect outcomes based on what the game master decides to associate with the cards, be it from the cards’ meaning, artwork, or whatever they decide upon. This grants the system a sense of mystique and intrigue, often hard to create with a physical game due to the need to disclose all of the rules at the start. Yet, even with this potential for hidden mechanics, The Lady Afterward just feels like a somewhat quirky tabletop RPG.

What is it that makes Book of Hours such a unique experience? There is one major component that has been neglected to be mentioned: Book of Hours has no fail-state. The player may be set back, but as the game states on its splash screen, “Go quietly. Book of Hours is a forgiving sort of game. If you’re worried you might be stuck, there’s usually another way.” The game is intended to be taken methodically. It does not hide its mechanics for a challenge; they are hidden so that they can be discovered. The game wants the player to go slow and learn. It is not so much a game about fixing a library, but instead about being a librarian. Its focus is on the enjoyment of learning and organizing. It obscures its rules like how a real library has its knowledge bound within books that must be searched to learn their contents. This slow acquisition and pace, balanced with the system's complexity, gives the game a unique difficulty curve.

Book of Hours, in terms of its system, is as weird as its occult subject material, being such a convoluted and complex system, yet at the same time manageable and discernible. The balance, framing, and gameplay blend into what can best be described as an RPG, not because of what it is similar to, but because it is the condensed experience of being a librarian. Book of Hours stands counter to the trends of its contemporaries and chooses to use its rules as its own puzzle for the player to chart, to truly draw them in and have them go quietly.