Black Book

Most games that claim folklore inspiration are doing cosplay. They take a name — Baba Yaga, the Wild Hunt, a kitsune — bolt it onto a boss fight, and call the research done. Black Book does the opposite. It was built by Morteshka, a small studio out of Perm, in the Russian Urals, working from ethnographic collections and consulting with anthropologists, and the result is a game where the footnotes are a feature. That in-game encyclopedia isn’t marketing garnish. It’s the spine.

The setup is bleak and efficient. You are Vasilisa, a young woman apprenticed to her grandfather as a village sorceress — a “khraroktun,” in the game’s rendering of the local term — training in the practical, dirty, morally compromised business of folk magic. On the eve of her wedding, her betrothed Vasily dies. Grief hands her a loaded gun: the Black Book, a demonic grimoire sealed seven times over, which grants any wish to whoever breaks every seal. She wants him back. You already know this is going to go badly.

Commercially, Morteshka landed in the awkward middle. Metacritic has it at 75, respectable but not headline-grabbing, while the Steam user rating sits far higher — the signature of a game that critics graded on genre conventions and players graded on how much it stayed with them. It’s positioned as a mid-budget narrative RPG with card combat, priced at $24.99, and bundled with a free standalone prologue, an Endless Mode roguelike gauntlet, and full voice acting in both Russian and English. The content-to-price ratio is generous.

It is also, crucially, not a horror game that jump-scares you. It’s a horror game that makes you complicit.

• Cards as Spoken Charms: Combat resolves through zagovory — folk incantations — where each card is a “word” in the spell. You’re not playing Hearthstone with a fur hat on; you’re assembling a sentence of damage, curse, blessing, and self-harm.
• The Key System: Certain cards are “keys” that inflict damage on Vasilisa herself. Deck efficiency and personal cost are the same dial. It’s a sharp mechanical expression of “magic has a price” in a card game.
• Bound Demons Who Need Chores: Vasilisa’s retinue of chorti must be given constant work or they turn on her. Idle demons are dangerous demons. Pure folklore, converted into a real resource-management loop.
• Anthropologist-Authored Encyclopedia: Hundreds of entries on beliefs, rituals, and terminology, cross-linked from dialogue. Optional, and easy to get lost in anyway.
• Folktale Side Quests: Many side stories are dramatizations of recorded folk narratives, not invented pastiche.
• Endless Mode: A roguelike combat gauntlet decoupled from the story, for players who want the deck-building without the grief.

The Gameplay Loop

Black Book alternates between two modes, and the seam between them is both its best idea and its most obvious wear point.

Exploration happens on a hand-drawn map of the Cherdyn region — villages, forests, mills, marshes — rendered as nodes you click between while a narrator sets the scene. This is closer to an adventure game or a visual novel with a travel screen than to an open world, and the game is honest about that. You arrive somewhere, you talk, you make a choice, you solve a riddle, you might fight. Then you move on.

Combat is the deck-builder. Cards come in two flavors — damage-dealing and support — and you play them into a spell slot arrangement that forces genuine deckbuilding discipline rather than pile-on aggression. The key mechanic is where it earns its keep. Keys are potent cards that hurt Vasilisa when played. A deck stuffed with keys is a deck that wins fast and might kill you first. Every fight becomes a negotiation with your own recklessness, which is, thematically, exactly the negotiation the plot is about. Few games align their core loop with their central theme this cleanly.

The demon-chores system is the other structural standout. Between story beats you assign your bound demons to tasks — some trivial, some consequential, some morally ugly. Leave them idle and they gnaw at you. This is drawn directly from the folk belief that a sorcerer who summons help must feed it work, and Morteshka converts it into a low-frequency management layer that keeps the supernatural feeling like an obligation rather than a power fantasy. You don’t own these things. You’re renting them, and the interest is compounding.

Where It Strains

Now the criticism, because this is not a flawless game and pretending otherwise does it no favors.

The card balance is uneven. The difficulty curve isn’t a curve; it’s a staircase with a few steps missing. Long stretches of trivially easy encounters get interrupted by a boss or elite fight that demands a specific counter you may not have drafted, and the game is not always generous about telegraphing what’s coming. Certain builds — particularly heavy curse-stacking — trivialize entire chapters, while more balanced decks grind. A patch pass on encounter tuning would have moved this from “good card game attached to great writing” to “genuinely good card game.”

The middle sags. Black Book is structured across chapters, and the third and fourth act as connective tissue between a strong opening and a strong finale. The pacing there slackens, side content starts to feel like padding rather than enrichment, and the map backtracking — clicking between nodes you’ve already exhausted to trigger the next flag — becomes noticeable. This is a classic mid-budget structural problem: not enough resources to make the middle as dense as the bookends, so the systems carry weight the narrative should.

The backtracking is real. Fast travel exists, but the node-hopping cadence between quest triggers adds friction to a game that otherwise respects your time.

The Writing Carries It

And yet none of that sinks it, because the script is excellent. Vasilisa is written with specificity — stubborn, sharp, self-deceiving in ways the game lets you see before she does. The moral choices are not the tedious blue-orange binary of most RPGs; they’re choices between two forms of harm, and the ending branches reflect what you actually did rather than a meter you filled. The English voice cast handles a difficult register — archaic rural speech that could easily curdle into “ye olde peasant” — with restraint.

The encyclopedia deserves its own paragraph. Reading an entry after a quest, discovering that the grotesque thing you just negotiated with was recorded by a real ethnographer in a real village, reframes the fiction as documentary. That’s a design decision with an actual thesis behind it: this stuff was believed, by people, recently, and here’s the source.

The art direction is the game’s quiet strength. Backgrounds are hand-painted in muted, waterlogged palettes — grey-greens, bruised browns, the specific washed-out light of a Northern autumn. Character portraits are illustrated rather than modeled, and the whole thing carries the texture of a printed folk-tale collection, which is precisely the register the story needs. It is not a technically ambitious game and doesn’t pretend to be; a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and it’s a well-composed one, which lasts longer.

The animated cutscenes — stylized, limited, deliberately theatrical — sidestep the uncanny valley that eats mid-budget 3D.

The UI is where the polish thins. Combat is readable enough once learned, but the card tooltips and status-effect iconography are built for more screen real estate than they always get, and the encyclopedia’s navigation is functional rather than pleasant for something meant to be read for hours.

Steam (PC) is the default recommendation. Mouse-and-keyboard suits a card game, the text is sized for a large volume of reading, and the encyclopedia is comfortable to browse. This is the version the game was designed against.

Nintendo Switch fits the format well: a chapter-based narrative card game suits portable play, with sleep-mode resumption matching how people actually play it. The caveat is handheld mode. Dense UI and small text are a known tax on a 720p portable screen, and Black Book has a lot of both. Docked is the better way to play.

iOS is the weak link, and the numbers say so — 3.7 out of 5 from 35 ratings. That’s a small sample, so treat it as directional rather than definitive, but the pattern points at specific issues: undersized UI text and touch controls mapped from a pointer interface rather than rebuilt for fingers. Notably, almost none of the negative feedback is about the game. It’s a port problem, not a design problem, which is the more fixable kind — and also the more frustrating, because a folklore-heavy reading game on a phone should be an easy win. Playable on an iPad. On a phone, bring patience.

Black Book is what happens when a small team makes the game only they could make. Morteshka didn’t chase a trend; they took the folklore of their own region, treated it as a serious subject, and built mechanics that argue a thesis about cost and grief instead of just decorating one. The card combat isn’t tuned as finely as the genre’s best, the middle act drags, and the mobile version needs a rebuild rather than a patch. Those are real complaints.

They don’t outweigh what works. The gap between a mid-seventies Metacritic score and a much warmer Steam audience is the most interesting data point here — the sound of a game that doesn’t grade well on a spec sheet and refuses to leave your head afterward. We rate it a Good: recommend it to narrative RPG and folklore readers on PC or docked Switch, read every encyclopedia entry, and accept that Vasilisa’s story is not going to let you off easy.