Review: Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle Looks Lovely

One of the blessings of the current era of gaming is seeing niche genres resurface, especially in the indie sphere. We’ve seen gamebook style games resurface, for example, with Yoshio Nishimura’s Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle being a beautiful and enjoyable example. 

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Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle features two campaigns set in Yuran, with us able to go through the adventure of Havelock (a warrior) or Paneri (a mage). Havelock was raised by his foster mother Ingeborg the witch, who also acted as his teacher. However, one day she hid him away in a coffin with no explanation, and he awoke in a whole other country and captured by a slave trader. He was sold into slavery and turned into a gladiator, but became successful enough to buy his freedom from his wins. After hearing a rumor about Ingeborg and her starting a rebellion, he returns to his homeland’s capital Erishing to investigate. Meanwhile, Paneri is an amnesiac who was found terribly injured and brought to Holm Abbey by a farmer who found her after what seemed to be a fight. Abbess Holm taught her magic, medicine, and martial arts. When she disappears after being asked by the Yuran court mage Ingeborg to go to Erishing, Paneri goes to investigate. 

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle is essentially a choose your own adventure game. You’ll make decisions at certain points that determine where your character goes, how they respond to situations, what paths they take through dungeons, and how they handle battles. It does feel more like a tabletop RPG at times, since you do have the character sheet, accrue experience, equipment, and items, and are interacting with other characters. So people who might normally avoid visual novels will find a degree of engagement here that could get them more involved.

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The story for Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle can get incredibly complex. There’s a lot of lore and background information, and by playing through both routes we get a better sense of history tied to the kingdom and the legendary beings associated with it. I will say that sometimes decisions and dice rolls can mean it felt like I missed elements that might have been important, so it sort of feels like additional runs are encouraged because of that? Though RNG might not always be on someone’s side, I did enjoy what I was reading. Especially after getting through the routes and understanding connections between characters. Just know that it’s also va

However, I would say the aesthetics for Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle are the main selling point, and Nishimura did not disappoint. I mean, it even starts with us “opening” the Virtual Adventure Book Witch of the Dark Castle by Y. Nishimura, complete with high fantasy cover art. The designs for Havelock and Paneri are both gorgeous, and many of the NPC and enemy characters they encounter look quite lavish and detailed. There’s a lot of effort put into everything. The presentation consisting of the actual book on the left and character sheet on the right also looks great. I love how the dungeon map design looks too. Sometimes the color icons for items on the character sheet and art on the actions we can select in battle did look a little out of place compared to character, enemy, and other UI design. Still, it’s just such a pretty game. 

There are also a few helpful touches I appreciated as I played. The way moving the cursor around changed perspective a bit is nice. Certain words that involve additional details, such as names of notable people like Ingeborg, can be hovered over to read a more detailed explanation at the bottom of the screen. Hovering over items offers full insights into what they can do as well. 

An important thing to know is that luck is an important factory in Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle. I’m not referring to a character stat. I mean your own personal experiences with RNG. I had a much easier time, for the most part, going through Havelock’s story than Paneri’s. Mainly because of some unfortunate luck when it came to how my decisions and fights went. However, toward the end of each stories I did find it seemed sometimes to feel a bit more unbalanced, even though I did feel like both Havelock and Paneri seemed pretty well equipped and prepared going into certain situations.  

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle looks lovely, and it being a solo endeavor from Yoshio Nishimura makes it even more impressive. The UI is detailed, it feels like a lot of care when into the character designs, and the story gets to be quite fun once you are able to start exploring more. There are some times a direction might feel a bit forced, due to the nature of gamebooks general, and I did feel the RNG got a little unfair toward the end of each storyline. 

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle is available on PCs via Steam. 

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle looks lovely, and it being a solo endeavor from Yoshio Nishimura makes it even more impressive. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.