Yoshio Nishimura’s independent game label Digitalis Publishing has announced that the fantasy RPG Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle will launch on July 9 for PC (Steam). Six years in the making, this title is inspired by old-school gamebooks and tabletop RPGs, having the player interact with a literal book in-game.
With a 30-year track record in the game industry, Nishimura started his career at Capcom (where he eventually became the chief background artist for the Monster Hunter series), before joining George Kamitani’s studio Vanillaware. At Vanillaware, he was involved in the development of titles like Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown, and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim over the course of 20 years.
As he recently told Denfaminicogamer, Nishimura left Vanillaware on positive terms following the COVID 19 pandemic, during which he’d moved to a remote mountain village in Japan and got accustomed to a different lifestyle far away from the studio’s offices in Osaka. Becoming independent, the developer fully devoted himself to the passion project that would become Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle. Nishimura initially started working on the game as a personal side-project during his last three years at Vanillaware, so the title has been in the works for 6 years now.
With a gameplay system that blends visual novel and RPG systems, Veritas Tales is a digital fantasy gamebook in which the player rolls dice, makes choices, faces enemies, and progresses along a branching storyline. The title draws inspiration from James Herbert Brennan’s “The Castle of Darkness” and intentionally keeps some of the inconvenient and cruel characteristics of old-school gamebooks, so suddenly dying after a wrong choice shouldn’t come as a surprise. On the other hand, the game modernizes the format with a save feature, voice acting, and music (by Final Fantasy Tactics composer Hitoshi Sakimoto).
Veritas Tales offers about 20+ hours of gameplay with 300 hand-drawn illustrations by Nishimura. Generative AI was not used at any stage of development, and the developers say the game “has a soul that can only be found in something truly handmade.”
Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle is scheduled to launch on July 9 for PC (Steam).
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