Book Review - Sea of Stars: Throes of the Watchmaker: The Concept Art of Bryce Kho
- The Artbook Collector
- 32 minutes ago
- 5 min read
December 11th 2025
In 2023 Sabotage Studio released the role-playing game Sea of Stars, winning over the hearts of players and picking up some well-deserved awards too. Its combat, characters, and world were complimented by the visuals of the game, with the stunning pixel art continuing in this year’s DLC, Throes of the Watchmaker. Back with another artbook, 3dtotal Publishing are giving fans a look the art that helped make it happen in Sea of Stars: Throes of the Watchmaker: The Concept Art of Bryce Kho!
Concept artist and illustrator Bryce Kho continued working with Sabotage Studio for the new DLC, bringing life to the characters and enemies. This new book was funded on Kickstarter along with his solo book, Overflow: The Art of Bryce Kho, but also acts as a follow up to the original artbook last year, Sea of Stars: The Concept Art of Bryce Kho. Set for release on December 16th, a copy has arrived here from the crowdfunding campaign, so let’s jump in.
Build Quality
Like the original, this comes as a 23.5cm x 31cm hardcover book, this time coming in at just 64 pages to cover the new content. The lower page count is all the book needs, but I’m happy it still came as a hardcover despite this and it allows it to match the artbook for the main game. It uses good quality paper and the binding is great too, as expected with the size.
The standout yet again is the cover, which uses gold foil to highlight elements of the custom artwork. They could use a promotional piece for the cover, but having this art created just for the book gives it a special touch and it looks incredible.
Content
This additional volume had a lot to live up to for me, as the book for the base game is one of my favourites, fortunately though, it packs a lot of punch in its 64 pages!
Inside you’ll find early and developed designs for the characters of Throes of the Watchmaker, from common enemies to the bosses. Kho’s art is as charming and creative as ever, coming up with multiple unique ideas based on the same description of what was needed. From here, it moves on to colour pieces that build on the idea to create the final design, allowing readers to see the process and that’s always appreciated.
Like before—and something I’m really happy to see return—the book abandons conventional insights and replaces them with the Slack messages between Bryce Kho and the game’s director, Thierry Boulanger. This allows us to see what was requested, Kho’s breakdowns of his ideas, the feedback, and then development, all alongside the art. It’s very effective and much more organic, giving fans an inside look rarely seen in game development. It also shows that beyond just the designs, Kho was giving ideas and concepts for the attacks too, a nice detail people may not have known without the book.
Unlike the previous book though, the in-game concepts are for the characters only and not environments, but the back does add in sections for t-shirt designs, key art, and the covers for the two artbooks. I love to see these and they are approached in the same way, with early ideas and then then the final result. This is again uncommon to see, but a very welcome inclusion and highlights the talent of Kho beyond just working on the game itself.
It’s hard to give personal highlights as I’m a big fan of the art style and game, as well as impressed with the choices of what to include from start to finish. The personality of the characters combined with the expert colour work makes it easy to see why Bryce Kho was not only got hired to work on the game, but gets this second dedicated showcase too. For specific designs though, I really liked the pages for Monsieur Tendu, Fardush, the Shield Cog Knight, and the superb book covers.
Overall, this is the perfect continuation to the previous book, acting as a DLC in itself. It kept the same formula and delivered more wonderful art and insights, and I couldn’t be happier with their choice to do it this way.
Credits
The biggest credit for the artwork is on the font cover and that covers 99% of the book! There are some additional credits on the first page for the sprites too, each of which are found at the bottom of pages to correspond to their character designs. A thoughtful detail and I’m happy to see them credited here.
Use of Space
The positives continue, because as you can see, all of the pages make good use of the space, minimizing empty areas and the layouts are clear too. Backgrounds are kept simple, but in multiple colours to make it more interesting, while not distracting from the art and text. The pages open fully and that prevents any image loss in the centre fold in the few spreads that art does cross over, so a strong showing for this part of the review too.
Value
Throes of the Watchmaker: The Concept Art of Bryce Kho has an RRP of $22/ £15 which makes sense for the book. Although it may be a quarter of the size, I would hardly expect the price to be cut that far down too, it still has to cover the production costs and comes as a hardcover after all. I do think this is a reasonable price point, fans of the game and those that own the first volume will see good value here.
I always check for discounts too and, at the time of writing this before its publication date, it is down to £12.99 on Amazon UK, a small drop, but it’s a highly recommendable price. No discount in the US, although the UK is always jumping the gun on reductions. It’s also worth noting that 3dtotal Publishing donates half of their profits to charity, so it’s a company worth supporting.
Verdict
Sea of Stars: Throes of the Watchmaker: The Concept Art of Bryce Kho is another superb showcase of the talent of Bryce Kho and how the designs are created for the game. It may be small in size, but the art, thoughtfulness of the approach, and book design allows it to punch above its weight. Like its predecessor, this comes highly recommended to fans of Sea of Stars, Bryce Kho, and character design in general!
If you would like to order your own copy, you can do so below, as well as checking out my review for the first book here – Book Review – Sea of Stars: The Concept Art of Bryce Kho.
