Six years after leaving Vanillaware at the start of COVID, Yoshio Nishimura has finished Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle, a handmade digital adventure shaped by rural isolation outside Nara.
Veritas Tales revives early fantasy gamebooks through choose-your-own-adventure questing, with combat driven by stats, cards and dice rolls rather than conventional action-RPG systems.
Two playable leads—a barbarian and an apprentice witch—investigate a monster-overrun capital after a royal bloodline sought the witch Ingeborg to restore its fading magical legitimacy.
Nishimura, whose past work includes Dragon’s Crown and Odin Sphere, filled the project with original art and explicitly rejected AI-generated assets, calling it something with a soul found only in handmade work.