Hermitage follows an unnamed book store manager who gets dragged into strange supernatural cases. He like an armchair detective where he never leaves the bookstore and instead, leaves all of the investigation to his allies.
The story is told in an episodic format where each chapter follows a different case. It's a shame, but the first story isn't a strong one. It's pretty slow and not that interesting until at least the halfway point where the bigger picture gets revealed with a very interesting climax. Fortunately, the stories get more interesting afterwards as more returning characters start to play bigger roles.
Many of the stories deals with occults, supernatural, cosmic horror and lovecraftian subjects so they were quite interesting to read. The problem is that the story delivery could be better. Similar to Mato Annomalies, a game that was later released by the same developer, the story has interesting ideas, but the dialogue and story presentation can be hard to get into. At times, there's a lot of complicated subjects and ideas being mentioned and the material is dense like reading a college textbook which doesn't make the experience very engaging. If you can look pass the dry text then you can enjoy the interesting story. It would've helped if there was voiced dialogue too, but sadly there's none of that either.
The gameplay is fairly linear. Every now and then, there are breaks in the story where you can read up on an internet forum for story relevant and irrelevant topics. There are some books in the store that can be read. Only some are actually relevant to the story however.
Throughout the chapter, you'll also get a few deduction moments where you fit the clues obtained to answer a question. You get 3 attempts and failure will continue the story regardless, but will ultimately end in a bad end later in the chapter. You can redo the chapter afterwards. After getting my first bad end in the first chapter, I decided to use a guide from that point on since I didn't think the deductions were always so obvious and straightforward.
Overall, a fun game with interesting cases and stories. I did wished there were more chapters and cases in the middle before everything came together in the final one. It's also not too long either and assuming you don't get any bad ends, it's a 13-15 hour story. For those interested, I recommend completing until at least the second chapter before deciding to give up or continuing from there.
The story is told in an episodic format where each chapter follows a different case. It's a shame, but the first story isn't a strong one. It's pretty slow and not that interesting until at least the halfway point where the bigger picture gets revealed with a very interesting climax. Fortunately, the stories get more interesting afterwards as more returning characters start to play bigger roles.
Many of the stories deals with occults, supernatural, cosmic horror and lovecraftian subjects so they were quite interesting to read. The problem is that the story delivery could be better. Similar to Mato Annomalies, a game that was later released by the same developer, the story has interesting ideas, but the dialogue and story presentation can be hard to get into. At times, there's a lot of complicated subjects and ideas being mentioned and the material is dense like reading a college textbook which doesn't make the experience very engaging. If you can look pass the dry text then you can enjoy the interesting story. It would've helped if there was voiced dialogue too, but sadly there's none of that either.
The gameplay is fairly linear. Every now and then, there are breaks in the story where you can read up on an internet forum for story relevant and irrelevant topics. There are some books in the store that can be read. Only some are actually relevant to the story however.
Throughout the chapter, you'll also get a few deduction moments where you fit the clues obtained to answer a question. You get 3 attempts and failure will continue the story regardless, but will ultimately end in a bad end later in the chapter. You can redo the chapter afterwards. After getting my first bad end in the first chapter, I decided to use a guide from that point on since I didn't think the deductions were always so obvious and straightforward.
Overall, a fun game with interesting cases and stories. I did wished there were more chapters and cases in the middle before everything came together in the final one. It's also not too long either and assuming you don't get any bad ends, it's a 13-15 hour story. For those interested, I recommend completing until at least the second chapter before deciding to give up or continuing from there.