Eldritch horrors surround Highrook Manor, but they're child’s play for the four plucky investigators at your beck and call. centered on cards and a ticking timer, elevated by a finely woven horror yarn. Published by Outersloth (of Clickolding fame), The Horror at Highrook’s busy simulation struggles with some indie-born limitations - including the lack of voiceover - but earns its keep with a compelling narrative and accessibly cozy gameplay.

There are immediate Cultist Simulator vibes here, but none of that game’s deliberately overwrought mechanics. The Horror at Highrook utilizes a similar structure where virtually every entity and action is represented as movable cards – from heroes to foes, equipment to food, investigative prompts to newspapers – with scheduled dialogue scenes between characters and, occasionally, the horrors they unearth.

Much like Cult Sim, Highrook leverages a pause function to mitigate the eventual stress of multitasking, otherwise running a game clock in the background that handles various functions and routines. The flow settles in after a patient tutorial, focused on engaging characters in activities while ensuring that some basic stats are tended to, like hunger, fatigue, and, of course, madness.

Ackeron Family Values At The Manor

The Horror at Highrook's Lovecraft-Tinged Story Draws From Cosmic Horror and Edgar Allan Poe

Highrook Estate was once home to the Ackerons, an educated upper-crust family whose knowledge-hungry patriarch, Gideon, ventured too far down a rabbit hole of occult knowledge. Their abrupt disappearance disturbs the residents of Blacksand, prompting the mayor to enlist four guild to unravel their suspicious fate.

The game's central heroes are a grab-bag of familiar tropes, with curious engineer Jane Astor, studious arcanist Titus Vitali, and big-bearded mountain-man survivalist Atticus Hawk. Plague-masked doctor Alice Caligar s the team on the second day of the investigation, an infectious disease department head who is prone to drinking.

One of The Horror at Highrook’s best qualities is its emerging narrative, even though the broader strokes may appear predictable. It perches on many familiar eldritch horror touchstones, but does so with care, confidence, and plenty of optional lore to devour. Anyone who just wants to jockey cards around and briskly resolve each chapter is free to do so, but a closer read of the available lore allows some nuance and rewarding detail to shine through.

It's All In The Cards

Search, Solve, or Slumber, Highrook's Card-Based Gameplay Can Grow a Bit Samey Over Time

I it that I was a little intimidated by any Cultist Simulator comparisons at first, but The Horror at Highrook is far, far gentler than Weather Factory’s beguiling and confounding narrative card sim. I never hit any direct fail-states, as mistakes and fumbles merely delay progress, and the scheduled story events always prompt after completing a series of tasks correctly, even after a few whiffs.

There are only single save-states per playthrough in The Horror at Highrook, so take care when completing puzzle grids, as these often progress the story to the next chapter, and it's possible to skip past certain bits of content. Also: make sure to pet Mr. Tubbs for an achievement!

To get an idea of how it all works, imagine that there are several grid-like rooms before you. To hunt for meat, you can pluck the Atticus card and combine it with a set of binoculars at the cliff top, which activates a search for food. You can then drag Astor's portrait to the kitchen with a meat card and prepare a meal. Finally, Vitali can be seated in the dining room with dinner and consume it to stem his hunger.

Mechanically, this process is identical to almost any other action, whether it be searching the cellar for crates, translating an occult text, fighting a violent entity, or sleeping to ward off fatigue. Drag, drop, and commit your cards, then maybe check and make sure a character isn't sitting idle when they'd best be applied to a task.

Don't Call It A Deckbuilder

Cards Are Symbolic Representations in The Horror at Highrook and Nothing More

The Horror at Highrook's simplicity and general ease can unfortunately drain the drama of any vital stakes. There are a few confusing details not thoroughly explained by the tutorial or in-game guide, but the systemic gameplay is generally straightforward to a fault. Surprisingly, random rolls or elements of chaos don’t seem to play a factor at all, something that may have otherwise added more spice to the rigidity of the game.

Cards primarily serve to abstract the action and engagement described, so don’t walk into The Horror at Highrook anticipating any kind of deckbuilder. Or, for that matter, should you expect a change of scenery, as the single map board of Highrook Estate – even with half of its rooms mysteriously locked at the start – never changes or creatively expands throughout the game.

Highrook is Creepy and Cozy

Sharp Horror-Comic Visuals and A Great Sense of Place

The Horror at Highrook’s presentation is simple but elegantly composed, with stylized character portraits that recall the work of comic artists Mike Mignola and Jae Lee. Shadowy birds fly over placed cards at random, a friendly cat named Mr. Tubbs casually wanders the manor, and any in-game actions are accompanied by lighting and audio cues that feel satisfyingly consistent with the cosmic horror themes.

Things do get weirder when more supernatural forces appear, but the overall adherence to form reduces any oomph that could have been mustered with newer environments or mechanical surprises. This makes the game's latter hours somewhat middling and samey; you expect something to really shake things up and eventually evolve the gameplay, but it all amounts to standardized events to throw cards and conversation at.

Still, The Horror at Highrook retains a charming coziness to its rhythms, a fluid routine of comforting busy work, accursed reality-twisting entities notwithstanding. It's plate-spinning gameplay at its best, punctuated by mad journal scraps and bickering teammates with their own agendas.

Final Thoughts & Review Score: 7/10

Lovecraftian Busywork In A Game You'll Want To See Through to the End

Unlike Cultist Simulator or Stacklands, The Horror at Highrook feels more like a gamified visual novel than a challenging adventure. This is possibly also why it’s so effective, with the tactile feel of its cards snappy and pleasing and its budding sense of progress rarely floundering, outside a few possible points of mechanical confusion.

I spent approximately 10 hours playing through The Horror at Highrook, unlocking 11 of 13 achievements. At least one of the achievements appears to require a second playthrough of the game.

This general lack of difficulty risks trivializing the game's air of danger. There’s a puzzle corner on the board where special collectibles are sorted into a nine-piece image that marks essential milestones. On the one hand, it feels good to finish this up and reveal the next portion of the game, but it’s also completely disposable as a puzzle, and comes off more as a perfunctory and inevitable stepping stone.

In the end, that’s a good expression of the draw of The Horror at Highrook. You’ll want to keep playing until it’s over, but primarily for the pleasant reaction of card events and new insights into its characters. While surprisingly light on scares for a cosmic horror game, its central mysteries are fun to uncover, and Highrook is a lovely place to lock in for a weekend.

Screen Rant was provided a Steam code for the purpose of this review.