The Horror at Highrook draws inspiration from Eternal Darkness, crafting an engaging Cluedo-inspired card-based RPG.

At first glance, The Horror at Highrook seems like a game of supernatural Cluedo. As a team of investigators arrive at a spooky manor, you’re presented with a top-down floor plan of the mansion, and some player cards representing your intrepid explorers. But you’re not trying to work out if Colonel Mustard murdered Professor Plum in the dining room with a lead pipe here. Rather, your job is to figure out why Lord Ackeron and his family have mysteriously vanished from their ancestral home. It’s rumoured he sought support from a clandestine organisation called The Seekers Communion shortly before he went missing, and his son was also suffering from some strange, unknown malady as well.

Thus begins the game’s Steam Next Fest demo, which covers the first chapter of The Horror at Highrook and sees you getting acquainted with its various methods of detective work. Everything happens in real time, and you’re free to move characters to whatever room they’re needed in whenever you like without restriction. A clock constantly ticks away in the top corner of the screen, and you’ll need to keep track of their hunger and fatigue levels as the days wear on to make sure they’re performing at their best. If they’re tired, for example, then you can just shift them over to the guest rooms to have a snooze for a bit. Hunger, on the other hand, can only be kept at bay by first foraging for food out on the cliff top area, before cooking it in the kitchen, and then finally sitting down to eat it in the dining room.

It’s a delicate act of plate-spinning, but it’s never so tense or all-encompassing that it gets in the way of your investigation work. There’s plenty of time and space for your scholar Vitali, for instance, to continue noodling away in the archives and deciphering complex journals in the study, as well as for your mecanist Astor to bust open supply crates to unearth more equipment over in the machine room. Your doctor Caligar is also adept at cooking up concoctions in the manor’s laboratory – though you’ll need to open it first by studying the key code Caligar brings with her in the machine room.

It’s all about matching the right character to the right task in the right room, in other words, and over time, you’ll gradually unearth a sinister set of notes and cryptic symbols that suggest old Lord Ackeron has been dabbling in some very dubious goings on indeed (especially when a little ghost boy shows up as well, who can appear in rooms unexpectedly and gradually erode the sanity of your team if they’re not quickly plucked away into a different room).

It’s very compelling, especially when certain actions require additional booster cards to perform them successfully. For example, a particularly stubborn rusted box will need you to store up additional focus point cards in the room before it can be properly unlocked, while trickier lab substances will need the support of catalytic powders or chemical worksheet cards to strengthen Dr Caligar’s basic abilities. These support cards are often only single use items, too, so you’ll need to scavenge more from doing your basic tasks as the game goes on.

Admittedly, it could be a touch clearer to see who’s best suited for particular tasks. At the moment, a player must hover their mouse over each individual character card to remind themselves of who’s good at what, but when Vitali’s skill list starts with Memories, Secrets and Incantations and Dr Caligar’s begins with Incantations, Sensations and Roots, it all feels a little too jumbled for its own good, and it makes it difficult to parse at a glance. Sure, I could always pause the clock to get my bearings, but that, too, feels a little fussy given how often you need to assign tasks (not to mention how small all the icons are more generally, and how much text is often onscreen to absorb as well). Fortunately, I did build up a certain amount of muscle memory by the time I finished the demo – which took about 50 minutes give or take – but if there’s one thing I’d like to see improved in the final version of the game, it would definitely be a more intuitive and informative kind of interface.

But I really did enjoy The Horror at Highrook’s opening chapter in spite of all the information it throws at you early on, and its tale of eldritch horrors and sinister rituals is one I’m keen to find out more about. Think Eternal Darkness but as a Cluedo-style board game and you’re very much in the right ballpark with The Horror at Highrook, and I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds when it comes out in full.