As much as I love the gameplay of souls-likes, sometimes I just want to wander around the world and just take in the vibes. There’s so much to enjoy in the environmental storytelling and lore notes that I’d love to be able to explore it like a horrible museum, letting it wash over me without having to worry about getting killed by whatever terrors await me around the next corner.
The Vermis series of books by Plastiboo captures this feeling in the form of gorgeous narrative art books, telling dark fantasy tales that capture the mood of FromSoft classics. Available now, my copy of Vermis III: Old Curses & Buried Horrors has made its way to me, and it’s another great entry in the unique series.
What makes the Vermis series so novel is the way they choose to tell their story. The books present themselves in the form of strategy guides for video games that don’t exist, laying out things like character classes, enemies, and narrative beats as a way to present their fictional world. As a collector of old school strategy guides, it’s a nostalgic format that feels like a truly innovative way of telling its tale, even if it bends the format a bit to tell some of its story content. It’s a clever hybrid that gives the book a narrative immersiveness, making you think about it in game terms even if what’s being presented wouldn’t exactly translate to a video game.
After a quick opening narration that sets up the book’s themes, you’re presented with a list of character classes, each with its own starting equipment and stats. The real secret sauce of Vermis III is the evocative prose that makes everything feel like it has a long, lived-in history. I could spend this entire review just posting large chunks of text from the book and saying “look how great this is,” but the one that exemplifies it most for me is the Wax Warlock. Described as “a bottomless well of knowledge, dexterous in many sorceries, such as enchantments, invocations, and pyromantics,” they are occultist who are so knowledgeable because their heads are covered in wax rendered from the fat of the Fallen Giant, which prevents memories from escaping their head.
I feel like I would read an entire book series about a Wax Warlock based on that brief description alone, and that’s only one of the classes. Others, like the Wood Witch or the Choirman, have ties to locations and events found later in the book, making it feel like a rich, interconnected tapestry.
Following the introduction of the classes, the book falls into a pattern of alternating between descriptions of narrative beats, introductions of new locations, and pages outlining the various creatures you run into. This isn’t a formal structure, and these all bleed into each other a bit, but it’s a nice rhythm that keeps new ideas coming in at a relatively steady pace. With as much as I’ve talked about how the writing brings so much personality to the book, the art does just as much work to bring all these sections to life. It’s moody and mostly monochromatic, creating extremely memorable imagery on every single page.
The events laid out in Vermis III are all wonderfully enigmatic, feeling like the strange encounters with Dark Souls NPCs that speak mysteriously of the world around them. All the writing of these sections is in second person, using “you” for the main character to give you the illusion that this could be a game that you’re interacting with. There will be parts where the outcome of an encounter is described as going different ways based on whatever choice “you” make, giving the impression that the “game” is alive and reactive. While the narrative elements of these are great, these are the parts that break the official game guide illusion most for me, as they are written with the effusive prose of a dark fantasy novel, not the more workman-like and easy-to-follow text of a walkthrough.
There are also references made to things that couldn’t necessarily be conveyed in a video game, like when the Shadow of Doubt shrivels your heart in dread, or when the transition between locations is a journey that takes “at least a week.” To be clear, I wouldn’t change this, as I think the writing of Vermis III is top-notch, but it’s the part that does make me wish it were a little more dedicated to the gimmick stylistically.
Vermis III, more than other books in the series, feels a bit more like a series of vignettes rather than a cohesive overarching story, but it doesn’t feel worse for it. This book has some highs for the series as far as short stories go, including the tale of the Eyeless Champion who holds the eyes of the King of Ashes, and your stay with the mapmaker who is trying to chart a labyrinth as he descends into cannibalism. It’s pitch-perfect dark fantasy that traffics heavily in various types of horror, even if the narrative throughline isn’t as strong as in previous entries.
The places you visit in Vermis III are all wonderful twists on standard fantasy tropes, brought to life in just the right amount of detail through the words and images. While it’s strong throughout, the final two locations, the Singing Palace and the House of Red, really stood out to me. The Singing Palace is a location hidden by a garden maze, presented with a full map detailing the way through, and features a side view breaking down its various floors and the horrors that dwell there. Travelling through the plague-ridden gardens, descending down the well into the palace below, before finally finding the Daughter of Locust, is a fantastic stretch of the book, building both a strong story and a sense of place.
The House of Red grabbed my attention by being a bleak prison haunted by mad prisoners and even madder jailers, making for a harsh landscape that feels like a true climax to the story. I wish there were a little more connective tissue between the areas, but each place feels like a great piece of the puzzle that makes up the overall world of Vermis.
To me, the part of the book that makes it feel most like an old strategy guide is the enemy sections. Anytime I turned the page to see a grid of messed-up little creatures staring back at me, I was immediately excited to see what it would bring. Just a picture and a name are enough to get the mind racing about what fighting these monsters would be like, but some of them have full-page descriptions of their encounters. While it’s great to have them explained, sometimes my favorites were ones that didn’t have details, allowing your mind to fill in the horrors in ways no writing can. A hunched-over skeleton called “Lunatic Bones” or a deer with a human face named “Distant Observer” are so perfect in their brevity, finding ways to efficiently do a lot of storytelling in such a small space.
Back when I worked in an office, I used to bring in the previous Vermis books and read passages out loud to my coworkers without giving them any context, and they would often reply with enthusiastic confusion, wondering what FromSoft wiki page I was reading from. While I don’t think you need to read them all to enjoy Vermis III, I definitely think that it’s worth checking out the previous books, not only because they are just as high quality, but also because there are a few references you can catch that tie them together. Plastiboo also created an unrelated book called Godhusk: Rebirth that uses the same fake guide format to present a strange sci-fi world that feels like a demented take on Metroid, and this one is just as worth checking out as any Vermis book.
It’s such a unique experiment in storytelling, and Vermis III proves that Plastiboo’s formula is one that has legs. You can enjoy it as an art book, a dark fantasy narrative, or even a setting to play in your favorite tabletop RPG (feels like it would be a perfect fit for the Mork Borg system). The book represents a perfect combination of concept, art, and prose, making for a haunting journey that I’ll frequently return to for years to come.
Vermis III: Old Curses & Buried Horrors is available now via Hollow Press.
