Abyss: Art Book

Well, the book is fine. I expected more of artbook, but in fact it’s more like a dump of short, very vaguely connected stories trying to tell you more about the setting of the game.Pros.You learn that abyss is a very dark game. There is a slavery, discrimination, oppression and many other things in the realm of abyss. I like it, because it makes the setting so much more real and believable. But it all should have been originally written in the core game.But in that case they would get a higher age rating, so… it goes stand alone for a price.Cons.You get each and every story written in French and translated to English. It basically doubles the amount of pages in the book. I guess everyone understands why it’s done this way. Book is about 112 pages total. ~50% are stories, ~50% full page art from cards/locations. Also translation is bad. There are typos and very weird phrase constructions. I’m not native speaker myself. But I used to read a lot of literature in English and this book was weird to read.And overall stories are just expositions on the world setting written by different people. It would be so much better just to hire a single author to write a good novel. And french text… it feels like half of a book is just wasted. There could be so much more.Art is gorgeous. It’s nice to see it on a big print. But I expected more of “how it was made and why”, not just reprint of cards and locations. It’s literally about 2 or 3 images with a drawing process. And almost zero comments from the artist.You can find a short bio at the beginning about the artist and that's it. I do not want to speculate why there is almost zero presence of the artist in this book, but I think I understand the reason. And I don’t like it.At the end you can find pointless interviews with the designers. It’s is lame. Almost like “How you made the game? We designed, designed and then boom - we made it”.Book price 25$... I guess it is stupid to expect much for this price. But I still feel that it’s not worth money I have paid.

Great game!!!