This one's a big bag of goodies. There's replaying the events of the first game in greater detail, approaching never-seen-before scenarios in control of new characters, extended takes on bad ends… and the so-called "protagonist" of the whole thing is taking care of his sick teacher, because why not. Since this game has been around for years before getting a Steam port, it was frankly impossible to go into it without spoilers; hell, I even tried emulating the PSP version back when I couldn't even imagine it would ever find its way onto PC; I only got to the second chapter back then, I believe. What's most important, Book of Shadows saw a change in gameplay style, removing BloodCovered's RPG style in favor of a dungeon crawler-esque point-and-click. I've seen many players disapprove of this change, but personally, I didn't mind it much. Yes, it was mostly boring and yes, you should be able to get into a room by interacting with the door leading to it instead of picking it on the map… but when you are in a pinch (which doesn't happen a lot, but it's there), you won't keep losing over and over again because you failed to get away in style; I did struggle with that in BloodCovered. Other than that, I don't think there is much more to say, the game is still ~98% a VN, and an amazing one at that. It might just be one of the goriest VNs that have made a considerable ripple in the West, if not the goriest one. The improved graphics are a joy to look at, the voice acting is top-notch, featuring some of the most recognizeable names out there and the OST continues to outdo itself each new chapter.
Thinking about the franchise as a whole for a moment, I hope its legacy didn't end with Dead Patient (which I've still yet to acquire) and I wish it could get a better anime adaptation (would be quite a feat if it did).
And back to Book of Shadows… I didn't mind Satoshi's role here, but I really wanted to see him in the middle of everything - the franchise tries so damn hard to make him the protagonist and I just want him to do something more to actually earn that title. Oh well, at least he's cute. On that note, I've had my share of spooks and gore for a while, so I won't be tackling Blood Drive any sooner than around this time next year - and trust me, with a backlog as big as mine, it won't be particularly hard.