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Yoshio Nishimura, a 30-year industry veteran known for art and design work on gorgeous Vanillaware games like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, is about to release his very own game on Steam. It's an RPG called Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle, and the best way I can describe it is this: picture a playable D&D stat sheet with great illustrations.
Veritas Tales is billed as a storybook RPG "in the spirit of The NeverEnding Story," a classic fantasy film. Your character's stats and inventory are shown on the right side of the screen – you can play as a fighter or witch – with enemies and encounters appearing on the left as you thumb through a book of adventures.
"As you turn the pages, you'll make choices, face down enemies, and grow," the game's Steam page explains. "You can charge in with a sword in hand, talk your way out of danger, or simply ignore it and keep walking."
Nishimura "spent six years in a remote Japanese mountain village crafting this game on his own," apparently drawing over 300 illustrations by hand. "No generative AI was used at any stage," the description assures. "This game has a soul that can only be found in something truly handmade."
To top it off, Veritas Tales has music from Hitoshi Sakimoto, who also worked on multiple Vanillaware games as well as Final Fantasy Tactics, Valkyra Chronicles, Tactics Ogre, and several other games that you would find lodged inside my brain if you cracked my skull open.
It's all very D&D, right down to the magic missiles and dice rolls, and that's by design. Veritas Tales targets the source of much of today's fantasy landscape, and minces no words.
"Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Dungeon Meshi," Nishimura's Digitalis Publishing observes. "Beneath the fantasy worlds we celebrate today lie the gamebooks and tabletop RPGs that first gave them form." (Dungeon Meshi, or Delicious in Dungeon, for the uninitiated, is a fantastic manga series by Ryoko Kui about fantasy adventurers cooking and eating their way through monster-filled dungeons.)
There's a lovely, tactile look to Veritas Tales – "an analog touch in a digital age," the trailer reckons – and the art style is unmistakable. At roughly "20+ hours" in length, this is the kind of RPG, and development team, that feels laser-targeted at me specifically. It's out July 9, and I truly cannot wait to play it.
