Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8093211/soul-biting

Designer: Marco Salogni
Artist: Marco Salogni

SOUL-BITING is a maze-based adventure story book for one brave soul (pun intended) to explore alone. Using the book, a writing utensil, and three six-sided dice, you try to make it out of the maze through success in mini games, your physical adventuring, and defeating enemies.

Throughout the roughly 50-60 page book, you follow the story and work to complete each maze without running out of health or gaining too much soul corruption. Along the way, you cross paths with many adversaries and other characters, face unique challenges, and try to never repeat any paths, as this adds to your corruption.

For a more specific explanation of how fighting enemies works, as well as other details of the game, reference my other review for the single page teaser “The Sleeping Giant”.

I promised this would be quick, so here are my thoughts after completing the full experience:

1) The artwork in this is absolutely stunning, and it ties in well with the story and the actual puzzles to complete. The actual length of the story and book is also impressive.

2) The experience was unique, enjoyable, challenging, and took longer than expected (not a bad thing; more bang for your buck!).

3) It’s not replayable, and, truthfully, I’m not sure I’d want to play through it again, but it is a wonderfully designed one-and-done.

4) The mazes and challenges increase in difficulty as you progress through the book. Some new sections also have additional rules that provide enough differences between mazes to not make everything feel similar.