The Horror at Highrook

As a fan of Cultist Simulator and all things Lovecraftian I really wanted to like this game, but overall, my experience was fairly disappointing. This is essentially a walking simulator in a card form: short, overpriced, and entirely without any replay value. The good: + The visuals - art, music, sound effects, character designs - are all very nice. + The story, although short, is interesting to follow; the writing is good. + The idea behind the game is solid. The not so good: - This is a one-and-done kind of a game, you probably will not play it more than once. - The survival mechanics feel like an afterthought, offering no particular challenge. - The game loop is highly [strike]dumbed down[/strike] simplified compared to the Cultist Simulator. While not necessarily a bad thing, I would've appreciated at least some level of detective work. Instead, the game holds your hand the entire time, telling you exactly where you need to go and what you need to do, which doesn't fit the mystery of the story at all. Instead of trudging through the unknown and being rewarded for your discoveries, you're invited to point and click for about 7 hours. - Even in such a short game chapters manage to get repetitive: you do a thing, a blocker appears, now remove the blocker to advance to the next chapter. Again, this clashes with the theme and reduces immersion. - All of the above would've been more acceptable at a lower price point, but since the game is never discounted below 30%, I simply don't feel that it offers enough value.

The atmosphere of this game is very nice, but for 19.99 it feels overpriced. The game also has no replayability, because if you told me that I had to play it another 7 hours, I'd take it as a threat. The gameplay loop isn't particularly challenging, nor did it ever make me feel clever, and you've never in danger of dying unless you want to be. I also went into this game expecting something closer to inscryption (not sure why, that's on me) which I did not get. Just a perfectly fine indie game, I guess. I'd recommend it at the price point of $9.99.

A nice little Lovecraftian homage to the Lovecraft-adjacent Cultist Simulator. The game is easier (and therefore shorter) than the latter, but I would definitely recommend checking it out first to get a feel for the mechanics. The only complaint I have is that the demo save doesn't carry over to the full game, so I had to repeat the first chapter, which took about an hour. I overall spent about 20 hours in this game, completing all of the sidequests. Not a bad way to spend a couple of days.

A really wonderful eldritch-horror card game. Control a team of investigators, who have gone to Highrook to figure out what led to the disappearance of the family living there. Manage your resources and move your cards around the board, in a mansion board that reminded me of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. It's a mix of a logic puzzle game, card/deck builder, and mystery-horror, as you unravel what's happened and make decisions. I'd recommend going in without too many spoilers for the gameplay. It does a very nice job of giving a general overview and tutorial, without overstaying its welcome, either. It lets you get stuck into the gameplay, which felt intensive and engaging. It was like working with a puzzle box, figuring out where things needed to fit and how to get them into position for the state I needed. I enjoyed this game very much, and enjoyed the story that was told with it. I think they did a great job developing the characters, and making them each have their own rich inner-monologues and beliefs, that sometimes came into conflict. Honestly, I'm really glad I took a chance on a game that I knew would be a bit different than my norm, because I thought this was fantastic. Definitely recommend!

This is a game which commits no major sins, but just doesn't have enough going for it to warrant a recommendation. While its inspirations, such as Cultist Simulator and Stacklands, could be pretty challenging despite their apparent simplicity, this one quickly becomes tedious, and decisions are so close to autopilot that I didn't feel compelled to finish it. I'm a bit surprised to see that even some of the negative reviews praise the writing, as I found it decidedly tiresome - and as a good story is one of the pillars of this sort of game, that's a big problem. I can at least say that the sound and visual aspects of the game do their jobs pretty well. I believe one of the introductory popups pitched the experience as a "board game" - to me, that's an exciting proposition. But fellow board gamers will understand me when I say that this is more [i]Monopoly[/i] than [i]Agricola[/i].

A good game. However, characters are struggling with vocalizing some very modern takes (and mind you, I am well aware of women's suffrage and more advanced petitions of real history, but you already have women in power in the game world from the start, so the whole situation with a genius wife looks more like a specific domestic issue; a lone genius trope is too overused) and kinda cliche. Dialogs are bad, story is nothing to take home. But visuals, character design, effects and art are gorgeous. Eldritch forces are not very eldritch. It was hard to justify risking lifes of 3 renowned explorer (who cares about some scumbug Hawk) to save a terminally ill child. Such humanistic ideas do not pair well with the whole world around. Gameplay is a toned down in the terms of grind (thanks gods!!!) Cultist simulator. P.S. Leave the boy out there, he's sick and useless, save adults.

I quite enjoyed the game. It scratched the itch of a cultist simulator style game. It had a nice plot, gave me the a good sense of being locked in a mansion doing an investigation into a scary cult and discovering the existence of the otherworldly. There were a few parts that got a little bit grindy, while you try to discover how everything fits together, but that is largely based on your pattern recognition skill. Otherwise totally worth the money and the time. Only complaint is that it doesn't really have any replay value. Once you know the story, there is very little that would change.

It plays more like a Visual Novel than Cultist Simulator did, but I think that's a fine change to make for a more narratively focused game like this. This is a great framework for more games of this kind to be built off of. I'm excited to see what the next game in this series looks like.

Really cute

Fun game. And I usually don't like card games. Good immersion. Hit the spot since I am in a bit of a cosmic horror phase.