Book of Demons

More misconceptions, or excuses, if you prefer to see them this way. Whatever the reason, I have made more poor choices in selecting games. When adding Book of Demons to my to-play-list, I'm quite sure I thought it to be from the same series as Monster's Den: Book of Dread, which was a lovely flash game I played many years ago. Well, it wasn't. The description of the game was close, but sadly misleading.

Book of Demons claims to be a roguelike deckbuilder, or even a hack-and-slash. That's a lie. A roguelike, maybe, but in other regards, it's on the level of a mostly casual mobile game.
The game sets you on a track through many levels of dungeons filled with monsters, equipment, gold, and exp. There's promises of dozens of varied enemies, different elements, many game mechanics, multi-stage bossfights... I don't even dare list them for how disappointing they are, although not technically wrong.
For one, the game has no animations, just sprites bouncing about and essentially particle effects as attack animations. Secondly, there's no "real" combat. There's a slow automatic attack pace, but you actually have to click (and keep clicking) on enemies to hit them. The movement is basically fake too, as you're confined to linear paths, essentially giving you a choice of forward or back. This is extra annoying if you're trying to dodge archers or mages, who can shoot at your from outside your vision distance for some reason.
Among other ridiculous mechanics are that some enemies can just summon more enemies. Sometimes right behind you, blocking your path. If they do, you're screwed, since you can't outplay them - it's purely a numbers test, which you will lose. Your saving grace is that even as the melee class, you have a much larger attack range than any melee enemy, but this also creates a boring environment where waves of enemies crash against you, and you just have to click on them all to die.
Speaking of clicking, there's so many things to click on. Click to break shield. Click to pick up loot. Click to open chests. Click to shorten your poison duration. Who adds the mechanic that you have to pick up gold by hovering your mouse over it to a PC game?
And were you wondering about the deckbuilding promise? It's just that equipment and consumables visually look like cards. That's it. There's no deck to speak of, it's just a lie.

Honestly, I'm upset. Not just because this is a glorified phone clicker game, but because I felt it actually had potential. The production quality doesn't seem low at all, and I can tell effort's been put into it. It seems very deliberately made, yet it misses the mark completely. Obviously, I can't recommend this game. If this was an actual mobile game, this might be a different story, but it's not.