Westmark Manor

[table][th] Review by [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34633003-Gaming-Masterpieces/] Gaming Masterpieces [/url] - The greatest games of all time on Steam. [/th][/table] Is this game a masterpiece? No, but it is a nice house exploring, puzzle-solving survival game that makes you mad. It reminded me of Alone in the Dark, although it contains no combat. The most important element seems to be inventory management, and this can be rather frustating if you do not have a clear plan what to take when and use where, made even more difficult by randomized looting. So I am even on the edge of recommending the game at all. I loved Resident Evil, but even there the inventory management seemed to have been easier than here. The setting is great. You play a scientist during the 1920s working on occult stuff in a secluded manor on a Norwegian island, trying to find a solution to reverse the flow of time to save your ill (?) wife. The game starts with someone knocking at your study's door, and when you open it, you find a strange mask. Touching it, you loose conciousness and awaken somewhere in your house... that has changed a bit. Exploring the house, you have to stay sane and discover what is going on to finally escape. It seems your family is cursed and bears a heavy legacy. The main gameplay consists of finding stuff and gaining access to new locations... in your own house. Gameplay contains heavy elements of resource management and watching your health and sanity, as well as your light sources. You find matches (one a time... why are there no matchboxes?), different kinds of keys (why are there locked doors, boxes, chests and caskets everywhere in your house?), stuff to make potions or identify items, items to use somewhere else to solve puzzles. Most item locations are randomized, btw. Moving in the darkness makes you go mad, so you need to light candles with matches or carry a lantern which requires oil. Finding (and reading) books teaches you crafting instructions to produce healing potions, keys and other stuff. Using an axe helps to open some crates (they contain nothing anyway) or doors. It's really like a one-player RPG without combat. Or a survival game inside a house. The aim of the game is to collect sigils by solving puzzles, which are required to unlock a gate and escape the house. Saving is possible at podiums spread over the house... but costs you one of your valuable sanity points. You can buy an amulet to avoid this. When you die, you can revive yourself using... a sanity point. Not a good idea, imho. Inventory is limited to a certain number of items, once it is full you cannot take anything anymore. What's worse, when you try to take something new the game now just tells you that your invcentory is full and not even what you were trying to pick up. Nor does it tell you how many slots in your inventory the new item requires. So you have to discard items from your inventory to take new stuff... but discarding really means discarding, not just dropping and taking again later. Yea. There is a place to store items, but you don't have this from the start and using it is... cumbersome. Quite a few items in your inventory are "unidentified", you have to use one piece of "identification kit" to identify it. Come on, why can't I just read a book? Or drink a potion? When discarding items you always have to discard a whole slot... so if you carry 5 skeleton keys, you have to discard all 5... yea. Crafting uses items, but if only one ingredient is missing, you cannot craft certain things... that's ok. But when the game forces you to discard things this really gets annoying. Furthermore, to take things that require more than one free slots it is not enough that you have 2 free slots... but they have to be correctly adjoining (vertical or horizontal) in your inventory as well. Yea. There seems to be noone stopping you from discarding items required to solve the game, too. Yea. An auto-map is available to show you the rooms you have found and some of the important things inside. Controller and widescreen are supported. [u][b] Conclusion:[/b][/u] Explore your own haunted house while not becoming mad (with your own inventory). Recommended only if you are prepared to deal with that!

TL;DR: The game is fantastic and worth keeping an eye on, but not worth playing until the bugs are fixed. First off, I want more than anything to be able to change my review in the future, provided the bugs and glitches get sorted out. The game does not classify as a horror in my book, but it definitely has a creepy atmosphere with a strong love for lovecraftian themes and story telling. The puzzles have been enjoyable and even quite difficult in some cases, though I was unable to complete the game fully to really tell if the puzzles were truly difficult, or if I was just missing a key to the solution. What breaks this game, unfortunately, are the bugs and glitches. They range from mildly annoying (a searchable object is suddenly no longer searchable until you leave the room and come back) to game breaking (character stops responding to all input controls, forcing a complete shutdown and reload of the game). This probably wouldn't be so bad, except that the game relies on a sanity mechanic for saving. It costs a sanity point to save your game, so when you are trying to hold onto your points as much as possible and save between long bouts of play, a single bug can cause quite a bit of loss in progress. Add to that the fact that most searchable objects have randomly generated contents, and in some cases, some runs will feel more productive than others. I don't really find the randomness to be a problem, but when you run into a glitch after things have been going well, having to restart the game feels very disappointing. Another issue I encountered involves a specific inventory item, or in my case, a lack thereof. A specific item needs to be found to clear out obstacles, such as crates that can be found strewn across the map. These crates are most often blocking access to something. On a whim, I tried running the character at the crates, and I quickly found out that the run button plus certain angles make the need for that object (for the crates at least) to be unnecessary as I was easily pushing the boxes out of the way. As mentioned before, I want to revisit this game when it's more complete. I've posted a number of the issues I encountered in the forums, and the devs seem responsive, but at this point, I feel as if I'm beta testing a product that's listed as being fully released. UPDATE: The devs were quite responsive and even posted a patch that worked to fix the issues I encountered, which is greatly appreciated and speaks to the level of care and detail they have for the game. I'll give it some more time, but I really look forward to tackling Westmark Manor in the near future when I can feel a bit more comfortable that the more problematic issues have been addressed.

This game has a good dark atmosphere. You can play the game in diffirent difficulties. You can make some choices in the beginning of the game. There is a sanity bar. If your personage got scared to much, the sanity bar will become empty. When this happens you can choose to start over from the last time you saved the game, or you can spent a sanity point and just continue the game from where you died. For example, you start with 8 sanity points. If the bar gets empty and you choose to play further with using a sanity point, your sanity bar will get full again but you will have 7 sanity points over. When you discover things, like remember something from the past, you can gain new sanity points. The points can also be used to upgrade your character. This is a good horror game with a great explore/craft/puzzle level. The price for this game is very correct. Click to see my first gameplay: https://youtu.be/2ceQF89UI4A

I'm not in the habit of posting positive reviews for games I'm yet to "beat", but...this is certainly my idea of CHALLENGING (!), and I don't feel I'm up to conquering it just yet. But still wanted to spread the good word. I've felt the need to restart this game [i]twice[/i] already after a gradually-improving grasp on the mechanics and game design, and am starting to realise that I need to restart yet again, so...I think I might need a bit of a break for now. Which isn't to say that I'm not suitably impressed by what I've experienced thus far; but it's the kind of game that requires a level of patience and loyalty I'm not quite able to give right now. Things do, regrettably, get off to a somewhat...confusing start. Straight after hitting "New Game", you're given a host of questions that are presumably intended to: a. give a bit more nuance to the usual "difficulty" decisions most games have you make, and b. "customise" the gaming experience to your own personal preferences. The problem is that I didn't initially know what these questions were even [i]asking[/i], for example: would you like more or less "sigils"? Well, devs, I'm not entirely sure...given that I don't yet know what a sigil [i]is[/i], in the context of your specific game. So I attempted to answer all questions in a "middling" kind of way - since I'm the type who usually opts for Normal difficulty on my first playthrough of any game - and hoped for the best. (Suffice it to say, I did get a better idea of what my choices added up to as the first playthrough progressed, but it still makes for a rather baffling start for novice players.) The controls were also a tad challenging to grapple with, at first. Merely adjusting the Graphics menu was, in itself, a bit of a trial-and-error situation; but the early tutorials were fortunately thorough enough to set me straight. Expect a slow-ish start and you should be fine in this regard. The visual style once you enter the game proper is...very interesting! A bit early Resident Evil - also a bit cartoon-y, like a slicker-looking Alone in the Dark - but certainly effective enough. Events are mainly, though not exclusively, viewed from a top-down-ish perspective, with the odd RE-style "camera angle" to add spice. A definite plus in my book! Some of the mechanics also hark back to classic "survival horror". If you want to save, you'll have to sacrifice a Sanity Point: a nice nod to the typewriter ribbons of early RE (you can also opt to respawn in the room you just died/went insane in by sacrificing Sanity; and fret not, you can [i]gain[/i] Sanity through your various interactions with scenery, though this is evidently a tad less reliable)! There's also some items that remain "unidentified" until you exhaust an "identification kit" to more closely examine them...so yes, despite being combat-free, it's definitely a resource management game in the finest survival horror tradition. There's even an RE-style "item box" in the form of an unpleasant leprechaun-type creature called a Thilix, should you find your Inventory filling up too quickly. A pesky Stamina bar also adds to the challenge of keeping your lantern oil supplies up, as you can't sprint through the darkness for very long...lighting remaining vital not only to the maintenance of Sanity, but a necessity to searching about efficiently (efficiency being the name of the game here, as you don't want to be revisiting areas any more times than you absolutely need to)! Which isn't to say that the game has no relatively unique ideas of its own. Take the "curses" that can befall your character, which have some novel effects on your character such as not being able to read words for a while (and thereby being unable to access and read your Notes)! Like almost everything unfortunate in the game, curses [i]can[/i] be overridden by expending certain items: but again, you'll have to weigh up whether it's worth it, as resources are in short supply. On the whole, lovers of story-rich Lovecraftian horror will in all likelihood [i]love[/i] this one. It's by no means the "scariest" game out there, but if you're up for a few spooks and a whole lotta atmospheric exploration (as well as a wee bit of not-too-difficult puzzle-solving), this game comes highly recommended...especially at such a generous price. Oh, and what did I end up learning about sigils and such, you ask? After my second attempted playthrough ended in tears, I decided to make things as easy as possible for myself until I became better at the game, which meant choosing the lowest possible number of sigils - you have to collect a certain number in order to progress through certain doors - and the maximum possible Sanity and number of Inventory slots. There's a lot of trial-and-error to wade through, and your chances of success on your first playthrough seem diminutive at best; though I suspect this is precisely how the game was designed, given that some items are randomised in their locations and whatnot (though I wouldn't quite describe it as a "roguelike", even if it does feel a bit like it at times)! As I said at the beginning of this review, I [i]am[/i] very impressed with the game; but right at this moment I have "complicated map and intense resource management" fatigue, and would be best off coming back to it when I have a little less on my plate, outside-world-wise. In the meantime, the price is extremely reasonable, so there's really no reason you shouldn't try it out if it sounds like your cup of tea. Verdict: 8.5/10. (PS If you enjoyed this review, feel free to check out my two Curator pages: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9284586-ReviewsJustfortheHELLofit/ http://store.steampowered.com/curator/10868048-Truly-Horrible-Horror-Games/?appid=398210 Cheers!)

Game was fun till the bugged puzzle. I saved my progress and the bug stayed so I can't progress anymore with this game. Game is not that bad but it's a bit annoying after some time to run around the manor and getting lost with puzzles all the time. Fast travel don't show the important puzzles on the map and also would be nice to see the marks on the map all the time visible, not only when I'm close to them in the area, because I can't remember 20+ (even more I think) rooms and few floors where I done something or passed it because I didn't had a proper item. Also I'm all the time full so I'm running around to the storage to leave my stuff and I go back and after few rooms I'm again full so I again go back to the storage and it's like this all the time for me. I really liked the mood and the story but I always forgot where I was or which way I took to find the puzzle I wanted to solve, because I fpund the item for it. So I need to pass this game :(

This was described to me as cozy horror, and I'll happily agree with this. I am about four hours in and I am enjoying myself immensely and still have much to explore. Survival horror with emphasis on inventory management and puzzles, no combat. I purchased the game on launch, but received a free key from the developers to give away on my release live stream. The game's difficulty is adjustable, where it adjust the amount of sanity, inventory space, movement speed, stamina and/or if I've understood it correctly how much the dark drains sanity. I find this a welcome way to adjust the difficulty. On the note of sanity and gameplay, this will be the most important thing to manage throughout play. Akin to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the player needs to manage an oil reserve and their sanity. Unlike Amnesia there is nothing really hunting you, but there are many items that cannot be interacted with while in the dark, so the players needs to manage their supply of oil, their sanity and judge whether or not using the oil is worth it if they risk running out and thus be unable to pick up more resources. There is some initial trial and error to get to grips with managing the sanity, but I find it rather forgiving. There is also another aspect where sanity is used as currency with the game's trader and some of the other aspects, where you have to give up sanity to obtain items or perform actions, once again bringing he focus on resource management to the front, a most enjoyable aspect of gameplay. The atmosphere is fantastic, with just the right amount of unsettling events that keep that nervousess going. Exploring the manor is a joy, and the music cues hit it wonderfully in anticipation of things to come, or not to come; like a game master rolling their dice at random to keep the players on their toes: a welcome sound design to keep it interesting. The game features a good map to keep track of where you've been, where you've yet to explore, where you cannot pass due to a blocker and where various puzzles are located, making it easy to navigate. The fast travel system is a welcome addition, due to the sheer size of the manor. The story thus far is intriguing, following entries in journals, mousings of the protagonist and piecing together the clues given in the items collected throughout playing. A most enjoyable experience thus far. That being said I have experienced a few bugs, but nothing game breaking, and I have faith the developers will sort these out in short order.

[h2]POSITIVE POINTS:[/h2] - “Westmark Manor” immerses you in a suitably Lovecraftian gothic environment. - It's a survival horror game with a strong focus on puzzle solving and exploration. - Professor Theodore Westmark finds himself alone in the sprawling family manor, pondering his wife's illness and the ancient formula he has discovered for potentially reversing time, which he now hopes will be the key to his salvation. His narrative will fascinate you. [h2]NEGATIVE POINTS:[/h2] - It has a difficulty not suitable for novice players. - It presents some excessively cumbersome mechanics that can interrupt the game experience. - It has some bugs that detract from the game experience. [h2]CONCLUSIONS:[/h2] Westmark Manor is a survival horror game that immerses you in a Lovecraftian gothic environment. Although it has some improvable aspects, the intriguing narrative and the focus on puzzle solving and exploration make it a great experience. [h2]EVALUATION: [/h2] 7/10. It is not the game for Lovecraft lovers definitive, but definitely if you like Lovecraft you will enjoy the experience, because even with its flaws it has many more virtues. I wish more games like this would come out. [quote][h3][i]If you'd like to see more reviews written by me, follow my Steam Curator page and help support my work on [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44998766-Purrfect-Games/] Purrfect Games[/url]. Thanks!

I was very excited to finally pick this game up and get to playing, so I hate to say that Westmark Manor feels more like an early access game than a full release. I was only able to put an hour into the game before giving up, due to bugs that force me to kill the game and restart. After about 30 minutes of playing, I started getting completely black screens with no way of bringing the UI back (I could still hear everything and tell that i was still playing the game, just without visuals), forcing me to restart. There were also times where I would interact with an item and it would lock the game entirely, preventing any new input from being detected and forcing yet another restart. This wouldn't be as problematic if it weren't for the save system that requires you to spend a resource (sanity) in order to save your progress - a resource the game itself tells you is a precious commodity and you should only spend sparingly. Regrettably, I tried several times to restart the game and almost always get one of the above bugs after traveling through a few rooms, making it impossible to progress the game. This game has potential, it very much reminds me of a classic top down puzzle game like Resident Evil (which I love), and it has the Lovecraft theme to go with it. Unfortunately, it's hidden behind game breaking bugs. I would wait until these are resolved before purchasing; thankfully the devs seem very responsive and it looks like they are actively addressing player feedback. Hopefully before too long these issues are addressed and we can all play an amazing game!

This game is a complete bug. A state of the art bug. I bought it something like 1 year ago and gave it a first shot. The atmosphere is nice so, seeing that mechanics were not working, the controller was not working properly (PS4), the menus were bugged,,, I told myself, let it age a bit in your cave and come back to it later... Close to 1 year later and after seeing some patches coming... I wonder if it is worst than before or if nothing have changed... It is still unplayable... I cannot run (it is an option), I cannot assemble a skeleton key... Pad or even keyboard is working randomly. Transfer to the storage room is a hell. Even the settings menu fails to appear properly... There are lot more bugs than that. It costs a high price for that... A swindle... I should have asked for a refund back in the days. My advice is, never buy for this garbage and pay attention if the same devs tries to sell something in the future.

Ah man, I would love to recommend this game. But I must be honest, like most Lovecraft-based games, this one is riddled with a curse of bugs. Traps that get stuck "on". Chests coming up empty despite using a key. The storage NPC dialog option causing the UI to break and forcing you to reload the game. Holding a lamp in one room, only to not be holding it anymore when you transition to the next. And I'm fairly certain that you do not regain lost oil when you load from a save (maybe that's intentional). Most of that I could overlook, but while a quarter of the way through the game, while loading from a save in a safe room, I was loaded into a complete different safe room (though it appears identical) in a whole different part of the mansion I had yet to unlock. So, I had bypassed a lot of necessary keys and riddles in order to gain access to that location. Really turned me off from the whole experience. The puzzles are considerably basic, unless you do not gain access to the proper papers in order to crack the codes. Some of the clues say things need to be followed exactly, only for it not to be the case when solving the actual puzzle. I also wish they also would not use a lot of the same iconography for the various puzzles because you cannot always tell which clue applies to which. Maybe throw some Transitus Fluvii in there to mix it up a bit would be helpful. This game has a lot going for it. I think that if they fix the bugs, then I would recommend it. The ending was lackluster, but it is a Lovecraft-themed game and there are no "good endings" in that genre. Though, I wish I had known that solving a nondescript riddle would get rid of a certain item and prevent me from getting an alternative ending. In a way, I feel like I was being punished for trying to be a completionist. Ultimately, I think this game could be great. But needs a lot of polish.