300 Hand-Drawn Pages Over 6 Years Built This Gamebook RPG

Over 300 hand-drawn illustrations. Six years of work from a single veteran artist. In an era where AI-generated art floods Steam storefronts and indie budgets get squeezed tighter every quarter, the announcement of Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle feels almost defiant. Publisher Digitalis Publishing and developer 15 Industry revealed the game today during the INDIE Live Expo, and according to its Steam page, it launches July 9 with English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese support.

The game is a "neo-classic digital gamebook RPG" built to recreate the tactile feel of physical gamebooks: pencil-scribbled stats, dice rolls deciding your fate, pages turning by hand. If you grew up with Fighting Fantasy or Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, that's the exact lineage 15 Industry is claiming. The Steam page explicitly lists Sorcery!, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Grailquest, and even Roadwarden as touchstones. Two playable protagonists, a warrior named Havelock and a mage named Paneri, offer distinct perspectives on a story set in the plague-ridden capital of Erishing, centered around a Dark Castle and its resident witch.

But the real headline here isn't the mechanics. It's the art.

30 Years of Craft, One Project

Yoshio Nishimura, described as a veteran creator with over 30 years of experience, hand-drew every one of those 300-plus illustrations. Six years on a single project is a staggering commitment for any artist, let alone one working in a genre that most publishers wouldn't greenlight in the first place. Gamebooks are a niche within a niche; the digital gamebook market lives and dies on passion projects. Inkle's Sorcery! adaptations proved there's an audience, but that was over a decade ago, and few studios have chased that space since.

I love that this exists. The games industry has a habit of celebrating scale, of measuring ambition in square kilometres of open world or headcount on a dev team. Veritas Tales is ambitious in a completely different direction: one person's hand, one pen, six years. That kind of dedication is rare in AAA and increasingly rare in indie, where the pressure to ship fast and iterate live is real. When a project like this surfaces, it deserves attention precisely because nobody had to make it this way. Nishimura could have used digital painting, outsourced backgrounds, cut the page count in half. Instead, 300 hand-drawn pages.

The gamebook genre also has a quiet but loyal following on PC. Roadwarden, which Veritas Tales name-drops as an inspiration, earned widespread praise for its writing and atmosphere when it launched. The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, another listed reference, found a dedicated audience for its branching narrative and consequence-heavy choices. If Veritas Tales can deliver writing and decision design on that level while pairing it with Nishimura's art, it could land well with that same crowd.

Dice rolls carry real weight here, too. The game warns that "a single careless choice can lead to an unexpected death," which tracks with the old-school gamebook tradition where flipping to the wrong page meant instant doom. Whether that translates to satisfying modern game design or just frustrating restarts will depend on execution.

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle is set to launch on PC via Steam on July 9, 2026. A closed beta or demo hasn't been announced. The game was revealed alongside several other titles at today's INDIE Live Expo, including co-op horror game In Us from YANEURA GAMES and roguelite card game LUNAR PULSE from Fahrenheit 213 and GIANTY.