Crafted over six years by industry veteran Yoshio Nishimura, this choice-driven adventure features art by the Odin Sphere illustrator and a score by Hitoshi Sakimoto.
Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle will launch on Steam on July 9, 2026, developer Digitalis Publishing and publisher 15 Industry announced. The game is a single-player fantasy adventure built around the structure of a book, with branching choices, dice rolls, illustrated scenes, and multiple ways to handle danger.
A new gameplay trailer premiered during BitSummit Mixtape on May 26. The two-minute video shows how Veritas Tales blends reading, decision-making, and role-playing systems.
Players move through the pages of a fantasy story, face enemies, make choices, and deal with outcomes shaped by dice rolls. Some encounters can be solved through combat. Others can be handled with negotiation or avoided entirely.
The game draws from older gamebook and tabletop traditions, with inspirations listed as GrailQuest, Sorcery!, and Fighting Fantasy. Veritas Tales is not a visual novel built only around dialogue. It treats the book itself as the play space. Each page can become a decision point, a test, or a new route through the castle and its surrounding world.
The project was created by Yoshio Nishimura, founder of Digitalis Publishing and a 30-year veteran of the game industry.
Nishimura previously worked as Chief of Background Art on the original Monster Hunter at Capcom, then contributed to several Vanillaware titles, including Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown, and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. After leaving Vanillaware, he moved to a small mountain village in rural Japan, where he spent six years developing Veritas Tales.
That handmade approach is central to the game. Veritas Tales includes more than 300 illustrations, all drawn by Nishimura himself. According to the announcement, no generative AI was used during development.
The result is meant to feel closer to a physical fantasy book, with hand-drawn imagery, paper-like textures, and a slower rhythm built around reading and choice.
The game includes more than 15,000 words of story and text, with an estimated playtime of over 20 hours. Replayability comes from branching routes and second playthroughs that can produce different outcomes. Since combat, talking, and evasion are all viable, players are not pushed into a single style of progression.
Music is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto and Basiscape. Sakimoto’s credits include Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, which gives Veritas Tales another link to classic fantasy RPGs and story-heavy adventure games.
Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle launches for PC via Steam on July 9, 2026. The game will support English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. Below is the gameplay trailer.
