How’s this for playing yourself: after a week spent clearing out my old family home, a week in which I speedran the lives and deaths of several loved ones by combing through crates of school papers, diaries and letters; with hands wizened by cleaning fluids, nostrils blackened by attic dust, back ruined by the floorboards of my childhood bedroom, and a brain brimming with faded happiness and pain, I sat down in an empty kitchen to play The Horror At Highrook, a cosmic horror table-topper in which four occult investigators scour a vast, cluttered house for the secrets of a missing noble family.
The investigators don’t have to worry about more everyday forms of psychic damage, like getting sucker-punched by an ancient photo while leafing through prehistoric tax returns. Mostly, they just have to worry about screaming apparitions, glowing fluids and cursed rings. But each does arrive at Highrook manor with a past to unpack alongside the workings of the house – a life story you can further by completing optional sidequests. And while the premise is fantastical, the emotional arc of The Horror At Highrook does, I think, correspond to that of many family home clear-outs.
It starts off mysterious, enveloping, haunting, but as the rooms empty of possibility, the wonder and torment subside. The task becomes practical and the practicalities recur, as the fundamental linearity of this chapter-based trawl tightens its grip on the impossible geometry. By the fourth time I pieced together a conjuring circle and pierced the veil, I was kind of ready for it to be over. And in the game.
Some belated nuts and bolts: The Horror At Highrook is a real-time worker placement RPG with a Victorian fantasy setting inspired by Poe and Lovecraft. The initial draw is the house, a cadaverous slice of masonry that bruises orange, purple and blue as day rolls relentlessly into night. Each room is themed around an upgradeable character attribute – the Machine Room is for Devices, “the ticking clockwork of souls and seasons”, while the Cellar is for Secrets, “that which glints in the shadows, that which hides in the heart”. Each room also contains a character and an activity slot, used to carry out tasks that range from defrosting a graven cartouche to operating a phonograph player. These tasks are always acts of combination: pair cards to unlock a new one, with another crunchy morsel of lore attached.
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The four characters all have points in different attributes, though there’s some overlap. Doctor Caligar’s knack for Incantations allows her to perform rites in the Chapel, while burly Atticus Hawk’s knowledge of Paths empowers him to snare rabbits on the Clifftops and, perhaps, turn up a trinket or two. Each task requires a certain number of attribute points: if your character doesn’t have enough, you can place a maximum of two support cards in the same room to boost your numbers. These support cards include sheets of chemical formulae, enigmatic toys and magic eyeglasses: some are consumed on use, others are kept and upgraded using scavenged materials, once you unlock the Forge. Characters, meanwhile, level up by taking lessons in the Schoolroom.
The character and item upgrades are carefully synched to the chapter-based story, which is the major way Highrook stands apart from Cultist Simulator. This is no open-ended quagmire of card relationships, spilling out through the quantum substructures, but a procession of tiered unlocks that follow a single core narrative. The relative focus makes the grind required to acquire or reacquire certain cards more prominent – and it’s this, for me, that drags the game down.
Each task has a completion time, which cultivates a sense of rhythm – half gacha reward loop and half dripping gutter – as you set characters to work on different aspects of the same objective. Time also passes in the shadowy world beyond the manor. There are regular letters and parcels from a variety of cryptic factions and pseudonyms, and a gazette detailing the wider effects of your occult delvings: shared dreams in the town beneath, and strange figures on the roads.
Each character sheds light on different echelons of the setting, by means of scanty dialogue and occasional pop-up journal entries. Atticus is an orphan from the docks: he takes a dim view of Vitali, the group’s snobby arcane scholar, who perceives Atticus as a hunky lowborn idiot. Astor, your Mecanist, also disapproves of Vitali’s enthusiasm for the occult, though there’s a hidden kinship between her mec(h)anical materialism and Vitali’s understanding of circular dimensions that overlay like sheets of clockwork. Caligar is my favourite, a brash, melancholy figure motivated by her failure to prevent a plague.
There’s a touch of survival sim to it all. Each investigator has a hunger, fatigue, injury and sanity gauge that must be periodically replenished. These material strains intensify as the story advances, but feeding and resting your gang of Gothic ghostbusters is rarely more than a pace-breaking formality, and a slight incentive to be efficient in the absence of an overall story time limit. At worse, it’s a nuisance, cluttering rooms and your card storage tray with slowly rotting consumables. Thankfully, you can make the survival simulation bits less demanding in the settings.
The subsistence element usefully contrasts the cosmically horrible discoveries. There’s something satisfyingly eerie about the fact that the same, mundane combinatory mechanics for, say, brewing moonshine can be used to summon restless spirits. The suggestion is that every humble object has its otherworldly frequency or extension, which can be realised by means of simple yet crafty arithmetic. I like the game’s… unflatness, the depth that somehow crystalises within a two-dimensional playspace, as you transmute cards into cards.
I’m a little mixed on the writing, however. The irony of Lovecraft is that, for all his association with frightfully-angled forbidden lore hovering on the verge of comprehension, he is often as mysterious as a thrown brick. Many Lovecraft stories are pulpy popcorn-chewers that pretty much wheel on the Spaghetti Monster from the outset, then flashback to the deciphering of arcane designs on dessicated boxes of pasta. They engross by means of density, what we now call “world-building”, rather than deftness. Aside from confronting and critiquing the bigotry that informs his opus, I think a lot of the better “Lovecraftian” writing essentially resists Lovecraft’s tendency to ham it up, allowing the horrors to remain illegible or immaterial and fragmenting the cyclopean descriptions into loosely networked allusions.
I haven’t read enough Poe to comment on how The Horror At Highrook responds to his stuff, beyond noting the erratic appearance of a raven card (which can be shooed from room to room to help with certain rituals). But I do think the game gives us Lovecraftian fiction at its most and least subtle. At times, the writing is pleasantly terse and fey. I love the Gift of the Bee card, for example, which signals “awe of the simple alchemies of the everyday”. It makes me think of the smaller, pungent finds I made around my own house during the clear-out: the anomalous pebble with “Create” written on it, the doorknob I couldn’t match to a door, the spare links from a lost watchchain, the envelope labelled “open me Ed!!!” with nothing inside.
The game’s larger plot beats are less enticing, however. Partly this is because the characters are quite rickety, with cut-and-dried soap opera motivations, and partly it’s because the world-building is too prominent. Indeed, most chapters are about building. Each tends to involve a search for the pieces of a summoning circle or other artefact, which must be reassembled in your nine-square-grid Composer. Once complete, you deploy this Composition to breach the portals and encounter some inhuman being. They proceed to talk at you like, well, a character. Not a force from beyond, not an abyssal derangement, but a person with some colourful deformities, peering through a cloud of glyphs. You’re treated to an account of some arcane realm that may be enjoyably and imaginatively worded, but is also quite… additive. The otherworld is just another world. Sometimes, The Horror At Highrook casts a spell and sometimes, it just spells itself out.
And sometimes, it’s just about numbers. The game’s combinatory logic is least interesting when it comes to the entwining of plot and upgrade. Typically, you start each chapter without the attribute points you need to uncover or apply the next collection of eldritch McGuffins. Upgrading your characters and their tools often involves figuring out a fresh set of card alchemies, but there’s an element of just repeating what you know. More brazen fluid and shimmering fragments for the Forge. More inspiring books and condensed Insight for the Schoolroom. The more the game asks you to go through the motions, the more you notice the ways in which it keeps you on track, and stops you progressing too far per chapter. Many cards have a limit on how many you can draw. Certain useful tools disintegrate once they’ve served their purpose within the plot.
Variety is created principally by threats. As you reconstruct the manor’s tragedy, re-enacting the grand ambitions and helpless curiosity that bred its downfall, the more you have to deal with meddlers from the Beyond. Spooks and anomalies take possession of activity slots, blocking progress and injuring or maddening characters nearby. The process of dealing with them is broadly the same as making soup in the Kitchen, however: match your character and support card stats to the number on the monster’s collar. Again, I like that the same card mechanics serve spiritual or temporal purposes, but there are definitely moments when this leads to bathos, rather than horror.
The Horror At Highrook will please you if you like Cultist Simulator but find it too ambiguous, or if you don’t want to play it in light of the allegations about its creator. It will displease you if you liked Cultist Simulator and were hoping for something comparably elusive and bottomless. It might just about meet your needs if you’re keen on cosmic horror, and don’t mind a bit of flavourful drudgery.
Given the torrid circumstances in which I started playing it, I’m quite glad that I’m cool on the game. If it had been some ravaging psychological journey with all sorts of unlikely combos to decipher, I think I would have had to play it in bursts, rather than cramming it into the first three days of this week. It’s certainly touched a few of the nerves exposed by my house clearout, but ultimately, it reminds me just as much of the closing day or two when I went from room to room mindlessly slapping Post-It notes on boxes, and having tiny meltdowns about bottles of shampoo I couldn’t rehome.