Westmark Manor

This game is wonderful to play. I would at first describe it as a game you play for an hour or two to understand how things work then start right over again with a new game but the challenge is more than that. Your character is in a dreamlike existence in his own Manor House and he has a lot to explore and rediscover. You will stumble a lot and I found like others when facing impossible odds to just restart the Nightmare again and begin a new game, using your knowledge from previous plays to go further and deeper into the house. And there is a lot of house to explore with intriguing puzzles to solve. Plus there is a story to the whole shebang which is revealed very teasingly so with a host of ghostly characters in minor cut scenes. I found Westmark Manor to be a good investment as I have now over 25 hours in play time and I may be only half way through in solving all the mysteries. Good fun, no jump scares, just a spooky old house with lots of secrets to unravel. Now with a special Halloween Chapter!!

Westmark Manor invites players into a charming and mysterious world where a grand old estate holds secrets waiting to be uncovered. This game combines elements of hidden object and puzzle adventure with a relaxing, cozy atmosphere that makes exploring the manor an engaging experience. The core gameplay revolves around searching beautifully detailed rooms for hidden objects and solving a variety of puzzles to unlock new areas of the manor. The puzzles range from classic jigsaws to more creative logic challenges, offering a satisfying mix of difficulty that keeps you thinking without causing frustration. As you progress, the story unfolds through notes, letters, and subtle clues, drawing you deeper into the mystery surrounding the manor’s history and its former inhabitants. The narrative is gentle and atmospheric rather than intense, perfect for players who enjoy story-driven puzzle games without high stakes. Westmark Manor shines with hand-painted backgrounds and intricate room designs that feel like stepping into a vintage storybook. The warm color palette and attention to detail create an inviting setting, enhanced by a soothing soundtrack that complements the game’s calm pacing. Pros: -Beautifully crafted visuals and cozy ambiance -Varied and enjoyable puzzles that balance challenge and relaxation -Engaging mystery narrative told through environmental storytelling -Smooth progression that encourages exploration Cons: -Puzzle variety could be greater for players seeking more complexity -Story pacing is slow, which might not appeal to those wanting more action -Limited replayability once puzzles and story are completed Westmark Manor is a delightful puzzle adventure perfect for players who love immersive, slow-burn mysteries wrapped in beautiful art and thoughtful puzzles. It’s a relaxing escape into a world of secrets and discovery, ideal for cozy gaming sessions. Rating: 6/10

[code]Steam Curator : ==> [u][i][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38545912]Right to the Point![/url][/i][/u] <== Follow [/code] Westmark Manor was a real surprise to me.A fresh idea that captured me with its dark atmosphere. In Westmark Manor you don't fight at all,you just solve puzzles to continue the story and most of them are very well made.You rarely get any hints,so this makes the game more exploration-oriented.It has also a crafting system based on items you find inside the manor in order to survive(items like fuel for your lamp,trinkets,relics,parts needed for solving the puzzles,etc).It uses fixed cameras like the old resident evil games and i really liked that too. A breathe of fresh air in this genre with the only downside some bugs and glitches that i hope they will be fixed soon.Highly recommended! [code]Steam Curator : ==> [u][i][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38545912]Right to the Point![/url][/i][/u] <== Follow [i]If you want to discover more games like this one and even more![/i] [b] Thanks for reading![/b] [/code]

This is a very fun game with multiple possible difficulties and endings. No real jump scares but very spooky, eerie, murky and slightly gory. Your character must make his way through a haunted mansion discovering over 100 rooms. Lots of puzzles to figure out, items to find and potions to craft along the way. It is slightly buggy but not game breaking and the developers are very responsive and active on the forum. If you like mystery, puzzling, adventure and crafting you will love this game. It is very entertaining in every respect. I highly recommend this game.

TL;DR: recommended, but with some remarks. I really like the concept of this game, because in my opinion it covers an overlooked gap in the current game offer. There's more and more horror games, but most of them rely either on too much action or on too many jumpscares. I'm a huge fan of games like Alone in the Dark or Eternal Darkness, where there's certainly some action (more in the latter) but where the focus lies heavily on the exploration, small puzzles, and putting all the pieces of a story together. Games where the player isn't constantly threatened by some entity (invincible or not) or stressed by a too oppressing atmosphere (often ending up in some scare). I want to sit and relax, yes investigating some mystery and yes there might be some threat in the air, but I don't like the feeling I can die and lose all my progess at any moment. A bit like in most Lovecraft's stories: there might be something dark waiting for the protagonist at the end, but that's it, at the end, not around every corner. As a game with lovecraftian links (fortunately mostly subtle) this is well done here. Here there's nothing chasing you and there's a huge manor (more than 100 rooms) you can explore at your own pace. You can die, but what will kill you is the lack of sanity. You start with a number of sanity points, that you can increase by exploring stuff (a book, a picture, some furniture) and that you can lose either by walking in the dark (so you'll need to make sure you always have some oil with you or find some matches to leave some rooms permanently lit) or by getting injured by some obstacles (fire and spikes mainly, but easy to avoid if, unlike me, you notice there's a button to run). You can also spend these points too: either to buy stuff from a NPC, or to save your game. You can only save your game at certain points, and doing that usually costs 1 sanity point. This is maybe one of the things I don't really agree with, as it forces the player to do long runs and punishes those who play in short sessions, which can be really off-putting ("shall I play a bit in these 20 minutes I have now? Nah, not worth it"). To avoid punishing too much if you die long after your last save, you're also given the possibility of trading 1 sanity point to simply respawn right there without losing any progress. Or at least that is how I understood the saving system worked, as I have to say that even before finding an item that grants you "free" saves I never lost any sanity point for saving my game, be it because I played in the easiest setting (you're given some questions at the beginning and depending on your answers it can be a bit easier or harder), be it because of a bug. And here's one of the two biggest issues with this game: the bugs. The game needs quite some polishing. I've been lucky enough to play it after some bugs had been addressed already, and I have to say that the devs are wonderful, they seem to read the discussions pretty much daily and fix the bugs really quickly. But, well, I know that because I had to report some really game-breaking bugs in the first place. Also there are small things that don't break the game but could be polished, and I'm not talking about the walking animation of the protagonist (ugh), but details as simple as a translation in a different language here and there or map marks not being updated properly. Small annoying stuff. Anyway, just in case: as of today all major issues seem to have been fixed. The other biggest issue is the inventory. You have a pretty big inventory, but soon you'll find out it's not enough - there are too many objects to collect. At some point you have to decide whether you keep an object or make room for new items by discarding them. And watch out, discarding them doesn't mean you drop them and you come back later, they're lost forever (however, unless it's something rare, you'll probably find more of the same later). If you don't want to discard anything, there are some safe rooms with a storage, although at some point it will become full too. All this means that in the end you'll probably find yourself exploring a few rooms and then looking for a way to get to one of these storage rooms to drop/retrieve stuff, which can become really tedious. I don't know what percentage of my playing time has been spent on the inventory screens, but for sure not a negligible one. Still with all there remarks I have really enjoyed the game. Depending on the difficulty the game can be beaten in a couple of hours, but the real fun is to keep exploring the house to find all the rooms, all the puzzles, all the documents, and put all the pieces of the story together. There's even some replayability with a couple of different endings and the fact that except for some objects the rest of the items are randomized, so you might have to navigate the house differently this time.

Multiple soft locks and bugs - the limited save system meant I constantly lost progress.

A fun, horror-adventure title. While still rough around the edges, and greatly needing more optimization, Westmark Manor still manages to be a lot of fun once you get a handle of its core gameplay. While the mansion's layout is largely fixed, many items are randomized, prompting exploration of the dark abode as you look for clues to solve the puzzles, which manage to be strange and as bizarre as their Lovecraftian inspirations, yet still manage to remain in the realm of sensible compared to other adventure titles and their extreme sense of logic. With that said, certain puzzles can be a tad annoying due to unclear mechanics, and the touchy control-scheme making more precise actions more of a chore than engaging. If you do play this, use a controller, as the keyboard setup is presently messy and awkward. However, even with a gamepad in hand, performing more delicate actions like walking across narrow ledges can lead to many frustrations as the player slips off into the abyss, or the bugged collision sees you teetering awkwardly into oblivion. Furthermore, map navigation is S-L-O-W if you're using high settings, though briefly swapping off effects can help if you need to look over the map. Still, the overall optimization of the game leaves a lot to be desired, and hopefully the developers continue to improve on the game's performance. Going back to the overall design, the atmosphere and music are quite good, with moody pieces that make the titular manor feel eerily empty and off, and sometimes tenser pieces that drive home the otherworldly nature of the game world. Though not edge-of-your-seat scary like Silent Hill or the classic Alone in the Dark, Westmark Manor manages to avoid the pitfalls of many modern horror titles by not abusing jumpscares. What few frights the game tries to pull, from falling paintings, to ghastly apparitions appearing during the game's more cinematic camera shots, nothing ever comes off as trying too hard like the Stream-bait titles that litter the market. However, with the previously mentioned bugs, you may find the frights a bit lacking when scenes fail to play out properly, or other issues cause unintentional delays in what should be more unnerving segments. Some personal hopes for later patches: Aside from more bug-fixes, I would greatly love to see the puzzles either randomize, or even have rooms and the overall layout change on subsequent playthroughs. I feel like this would greatly help in expanding the replay value for the game. Furthermore, a sub-inventory for the player-character could be interesting, limiting the number of relics the player can equip at a given time.

Juego entretenido y recomendable que ha ido mejorando de manera constante. Lo jugué por primera vez hace tiempo cuando salió la actualización de Halloween y se me hizo un poco lento además de tener algunos bugs. Hace un mes le di otra oportunidad y creo que el juego tiene cosas muy buenas y algunas mejorables. Es un juego de exploración pura donde hay que ir registrando todas las habitaciones de la mansión. El problema para mí es que no hay apenas linealidad, por lo que durante muchos ratos estás explorando sin saber muy bien cuál es el objetivo o qué objetos necesitas quedarte o puedes tirar. Sin embargo, cuando consigues conectar 2 o 3 elementos diferentes, consigues que los puzzles sean más dinámicos y alcanzas esa sensación de conexión e interés que he tenido con los juegos antiguos de Sherlock Holmes, por ejemplo. Como nota informativa, he experimentado 3 bugs principales: los frascos de aceite pequeños no se consumían cuando se me acababan los grandes, una zona de caída en la que el personaje no moría y se quedaba cayendo eternamente y una puerta de llave maestra a la que no podía llegar por una "pared invisible" que no me permitía usar la llave. Gracias a los desarrolladores por este juego.

This is a poorly optimized and buggy indie horror game made with the Unity engine that has an isometric top down view and a locked camera angle. The frame rate for the main menu for me with an RTX2080 and i9 processor was in the low 30s. There are also some cutscenes and places inside the house where the frame rate drops down into the 40s even with the graphics set to low. You also cannot access the settings in-game and must exit back to the main menu to make any changes. There are some rooms that have flickering floor textures and the graphics are mostly faded with muddy textures. Sometimes the game also does not recognize a controller. Due to the locked camera angle, it also gets confusing sometimes where you are and where you are heading. The number of saves and loads are also limited and the gameplay is just boring. I cannot recommend this game at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8heeyAYaTJA Westmark Manor - это хардкорный сурвайвал-хоррор-квест, с особым ударением на слове "сурвайвал". Сюжет очень интересен, но в начале игры еще не особо понятен, поэтому его описывать не буду. Опишу лучше геймплей. Мы находимся в огромном викторианском особняке, наполненном тьмой. Тьма нас убивает, и защититься от нее мы можем только с помощью света - нашего фонаря и свечей. Фонарь требует масла, а свечи - спичек. Масло кончается очень быстро и необходимо тщательно его экономить. Наша задача - обыскать особняк и найти все сигилы, которые откроют выход. В особняке мы сможем найти огромное количество предметов. Также имеется крафт, но для него нужно вначале найти рецепты. Инвентарь у нас довольно маленький, это очень неудобно. Есть в определенной комнате хранилище, где можно оставить часть предметов, но оно тоже не особо вместительное. Также в игре имеется, скажем так, торговец. Есть в игре еще кое-что: рассудок. И это именно то, что делает игру невероятно хардкорной - его мало, его неизвестно как повысить, но он тратится на сохранение игры (да-да!) и на покупки у торговца. А еще тратится просто так, когда персонаж боится. Тоесть, есть очки рассудка, а есть полоска. Полоска тратится от страха и ее восстановить можно, а все остальное тратит очки, которые не восстановить. Игра шикарно выглядит и звучит. Управление удобное (играл на геймпаде), только персонаж довольно медлительный. Вцелом, это отличная игра для любителей хардкора. Всем остальным остается надеяться, что разработчики удалят из игры показатель рассудка вообще.