The Painscreek Killings - The Making of The Painscreek Killings

This book is certainly for a niche crowd, but if you have an interest in game design I would highly recommend it. The Making of The Painscreek Killings is a fascinating and easily readable case study of a heavily flawed game development that provides the reader with the opportunity to learn from EQ Studio's mistakes and hopefully avoid making those mistakes yourself. I'm not even a game developer (or plan to be one) but I found the text very interesting from the perspective of understanding how the story was written and what the team considered to be their inspirations.
I wish it spoke a little more on the reception of the game's story and whether or not the mystery was able to fool enough players but I suppose that data would be very difficult to gather. It should also be noted that the book is really closer to 100 pages in length as a lot of the pages are screenshots of in-game locations or of development software and references.

Bottom line, if you liked Painscreek Killings or if you're a game dev you will probably learn something from this book as it chronicles the ups and downs of some inspired, first-time developers.