I was surprised to learn that The Horror at Highrook is an original production. From how it plays, I’d initially assumed it was an adaptation of a “living” board game that I’d never heard of, along the lines of Arkham Horror or Betrayal at House on the Hill.
I also figured that it would take me about six hours to learn how to play it, so I’d feel confident about its mechanics right in time for the closing credits. Thankfully, Highrook isn’t that hard to pick up, especially if you’ve got any experience with the sorts of story-building card games that inspired it. Its primary issue is that it’s too random for its own good, in ways that suggest it’s meant to extend its own running time.
In a Victorian-era fantasy world, a team of four investigators have been sent to solve the disappearance of the Ackeron family. The investigators start their search at the Ackerons’ estate of Highrook, and quickly learn that Gideon Ackeron was obsessed with finding a way to connect to another dimension.
In order to find Gideon and his wife and son, your team is forced to retrace and replicate Gideon’s occult experiments. That includes a deep dive into the history of the family and the surrounding area, breaking into the house’s various locked rooms, and an occasional fight for their lives and/or souls.
Highrook starts off slowly, with only 3 team members and half the total map. As you explore the estate, you collect task cards, which can be used in specific areas of Highrook to complete specific goals: cook a meal, research a topic, find useful plants in the garden.
Each of your investigators has 6 stats that reflect their own particular areas of expertise, such as study, wilderness survival, or chemistry. Your job is to match your team members with the correct tasks, as well as monitor each one’s health, hunger, exhaustion, and sanity. It’s a plate-juggling simulator, but you can pause Highrook at any time to set up your tasks.
As you make progress, you open up more of the mansion, but every job gets tougher. You can level up your characters’ stats eventually, but the bulk of the mid- to late game involves the discovery and hoarding of boon cards that give extra bonuses to specific tasks. You also have to deal with hostile presences in the mansion that can penalize or injure your characters, or which might drive them insane before they can complete an objective.
Highrook is absolutely one of those games that’s harder to describe than it is to play, and it’s easy to make it sound like it’s more punishing or complicated than it actually is. If anything, its default settings might be too lenient, as I rarely had a problem keeping my investigators healthy and sane.
Granted, most of my team became alcoholics, as the easiest way to restore sanity is to brew and drink some moonshine, but at least they weren’t crazy alcoholics. The moral of this story is that inhuman nightmares that dwell beyond the veil of sleep are easier to handle when you’re completely twisted on bathtub hooch. Consider yourselves educated.
Highrook’s resource management does get easier once you figure out some of its underlying systems, like how actions seem guaranteed to fail if they’ll produce a card you’ve already got. It’s also not quite as random as it initially seems, since several rooms in the mansion are linked with particular cards. If you need a particular boon, you just need to know where to look.
There are a couple of specific elements that are more annoying than anything else, however. The most obvious one is Tubbs, a cat that randomly patrols throughout Highrook, who can decide to sit on an empty task card slot and refuse to be moved for several in-game hours. Is this accurate cat behavior? Absolutely. Should I be able to move the damn cat so I can kill the monster that’s in the room with it? Also yes.
Highrook’s endgame is also chiefly occupied with the careful use of boon cards, several of which aren’t reliably available. The more obscure boons are only accessible as a potential drop from certain tasks, and it’s not weird to reach a point where you can’t make progress at all without one of them. At that point, you have to just keep rolling the dice, whether that means getting somebody to sleep for a full day, making multiple dark offerings in the Highrook chapel, or forcing your scholar to bolt down plate after plate of potentially poisonous mushrooms.
That tendency to rely on RNG over mechanics carries forward to a couple of major objectives, where you have to simply keep using a particular item over and over again until it generates the right cards. There’s nothing in Highrook that tells you this, so it’s easy to think you’ve hit a dead end when you were actually supposed to keep going with a single repetitive task… which you had stopped doing because it failed repeatedly. The problem wasn’t that I’d leapt to a faulty conclusion, but that I’d stopped beating my head against that particular wall.
For all my complaints, I did complete Highrook in two long sessions. It’s got an oddly hypnotic quality once you figure it out, especially in the moments when several tasks all complete at once and immediately explode into twice as many new objectives.
That makes it worse when it visibly runs out of ideas. The Horror at Highrook starts and ends strong, but there are points at which it’s obviously scrambling to give you new things to do. It’s short, but it’s still a little padded, and that drags down its average.
The Horror at Highrook is the kind of game that ends up feeling like a solid pilot project, and if you’re into cosmic horror or weird board games, you’ll get a couple of fun evenings out of it. I’d be interested in a sequel that trimmed some of the fat, but I enjoyed the overall experience.
[The Horror at Highrook, developed by Nullpointer Games and published by Nullpointer Games and Outersloth, is now available for PC via Steam for $19.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a PR representative for Nullpointer.]
