The Horror at Highrook

I want to like this game. It's an interesting and fun spin on cultist simulator that's far more approachable. Unfortunately, the downside is the game is pretty bug-prone. I've softlocked twice in Chapter 2 and been unable to proceed. There's no save states for resetting on chapters you have to restart the entire game. I'm not alone in this issue as there are many people on the discussion board having similar issues. If the game is going to be this brittle it -needs- a way to not restart the game from scratch every time. I would like to finish the game, but I am not going to restart from the beginning a 3rd time and lose another few hours just to likely get soft locked again. Since I'm far past the point of refunding since I tried to restart I just have to leave this review as a warning for potential buyers.

If you like the idea of Cultist Simulator or Book of Hours, but the length and complexity of those games frightens you, then Horror at Highrook is for you. I personally didn't get much out of it because I enjoy the greater complexity of those two games, but I'm giving it a thumbs up because I can recognize a well made game that just happens to be targeted at a different audience than me.

First up I can give this game a recommendation, if you like story heavy games and are ready to read a lot. Ohterwise it is a mixed bag and is maybe not the game for you. The "gameplay" part is rather limited. Yet it is still a very lovely and short game about a mystery in an old mansion. It is a riddle game played out like a boardgame with cards. You have to find the right combinations and do some light character management. Overall the games puzzles are very easy and it is more a check of your memory skills to remember in which room you get which item. The main positive for me was the overall art style, music and sound effects. The drop of the main titel in the main screen alone sets the perfect tone. The board, it's cards and the story told via text snippets match this energy perfectly. To top it off the sound is very well done as a backdrop to the gameplay. The horror part of the game is rather light and is limited to the overall astetic of the game. There are no jumpscares in...

It's a good game, really enjoyed playing it. I think it's good in length for the story and game play, I enjoy the mechanics all tho it's a tiny bit repetitive once you go through a couple of chapters, they do throw in some mechanics to make it a bit different and to change the order of game play which for me was welcomed. I really enjoyed the art direction and the look of other beings. Only real negative thing I can say which can be annoying is you can get soft locked/ stuck story wise if you don't do some stuff immediately or in a certain order. Other than that it's a good game with an interesting story and good art direction.

This game is very well done. After coming out of a gaming slump, this was exactly what I needed to remind myself of how good games can be. I always like lovecraftian horror concepts, but I was a little hesitant with the board game aspect of this. I ended up really loving the gameplay of this. Very fun to play and I really liked all the characters as well as their designs. The story was nice, too. I like that each of the team has a character they connect with that they're specifically looking out for. Good parallels.

This game has a batshit crazy premise when you say it out loud but it's a wonderfully sound, setting with great writing. The weird and cool story really drew me in. The survival investigation portion is fun, frantic and at times frustrating as you figure out how you made the thing work the last time you did it. I thought I had softlocked myself in Chapter 6 but as the game warns you at the start, just had to work back through things and found what I'd missed. A great game, snappy story, a good length for it too

OMChtulhu... it starts out as fun, but this is basically "Memory" where you need to keep track of which area drops which bonus cards which you need to complete tasks. Good story, but 0 replayability.

A fair little puzzle game with a decent story. A little derivative of cultist sim, but not egregiously so. It's reminiscent of a point a click story game. It's not very difficult and mostly on the rails. Though there is one opportunity to soft lock yourself [spoiler]if you spend your "insight" on things other than leveling up. There is an unique, reusable item you get later in the game which gives you the aspect required to use the classroom[/spoiler]. I expect this will probably be patched out as it feels a bit out of place. I expected the game to be more difficult. The only lose condition outside of the potential soft lock is failing to manage your characters health/sanity/hunger, which even on the hardest difficulty are easy to manage for someone familiar with these types of games. I do suppose the final chapter would be more difficult if you didn't prepare in the penultimate chapter. I would have liked to see more opportunity for player choice to affect the outcome of the story....

A great card-based resource management sim! A fun little story, and managing multiple characters added a fun challenge.

[h1]It's refreshing to see someone take Weather Factory's idea and make it into a [i]normal[/i] game.[/h1] Weather Factory, if you don't know, are creators of Cultist Simulator. And their games are... pretty annoying. Say, one of their games has an item - January Sanguinary. [list] [*]I have no idea what it could mean [*]I don't know the word so I go and google it. It still doesn't make sense [*]I refer to wiki. Wiki has all kinds of explanations and overall context [*]But still nothing that explains [i]what[/i] that item is and why it has "January" in it's name [*]I have no choice but to conclude that it's [i]just[/i] a cool sounding name that means nothing [/list] And all their games are like that. Just a pieces of word salad that dont make sense end dont even try to form a coherent narrative. But they are wrapped in pretty compelling gameplay that I like in all aspects exept the main one - actual reading. [h1]The Horror at Highrook, on the other hand, is [i]just[/i] a normal g...