When the COVID pandemic began, Vanillaware artist and developer Yoshio Nishimura departed the studio and moved into the rural mountains outside of Nara. For six years, Nishimura rekindled his love of early fantasy “gamebooks,” which heavily informed his work on Dragon’s Crown, Odin Sphere and Monster Hunter. Now that isolated labor of love is complete, and like minded sorcerers can step back into an idiosyncratic realm of paper and pencil.
In Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle, a world ruled by divine magicians is under threat. When one kingdom’s enchanted royal lineage waned, they sought the illustrious witch Ingeborg to restore their arcane bona fides. Now the capitol is overrun with monsters. Given your choice between a humble barbarian and an apprentice witch, both with their own peculiar histories with Ingeborg, you must seek out the truth and stop the blight before it inks over into every inch of the map.
The game is presented as an old school adventure gamebook, such as J. H. Brennan’s Grailquest or Ian Livingstone’s Deathtrap Dungeon (not to be mistaken for the horndog ‘90s PlayStation re-imaging). Combat will test your stats, cards and dice rolls against ghouls and golem, but the bulk of the game is decided in choose-your-own-adventure style questing. Making key decisions, settling on allies and enemies, and flipping to their corresponding pages. It’s a delightfully meta affair. A jaunty wizard walks you through your adventure and deploys anything he can find in his pockets to make things more interesting. You’ll flip coins, scribble notes and speed read against a pocket watch as zombies barge through the door.
Vanillaware’s games have always been defined by their painterly approach to art and animation. Nishimura’s countryside residency has shown what focus can come from isolation. Veritas Tales is page to digital page of luxe original character art, animations, maps and moments that verge on ‘illusions.’ Each glossy beard hair shimmers and each rustic paper is coarse. It goes without saying that a developer who moved into nature opted against using AI to generate anything in his ornate game, writing on the Steam page that Veritas Tales “has a soul that can only be found in something truly handmade.”
Veritas Tales is a spritely, oddball and gorgeous tribute to pen and paper gaming. It clearly comes from very specific, heartfelt memories that are successfully passed along to you, vicariously. From time to time, the game even fling more gamebooks your way, as if to suggest you continue to forge your own adventures.