As someone who studies strange artifacts, you would think that it would be obvious not to bring one home until after it has been studied. Unfortunately, it looks like we put our own home at risk in Westmark Manor by bringing home mysterious material in hopes of studying it and finding a way to cure our wife’s ailments. This nightmarish, puzzle/exploration game from Nodbrim Interactive and Toadman Interactive brings the inspirations of the late H.P. Lovecraft into a new form. But does it hold up in its own right?

Story

Theodore Westmark is a curator at the department of ancient history. His hopes to free his wife Elizabeth from her nightmarish illness drives him to an island off the coast of Norway where he was looking for in Vörnum. After bringing all the material back to his manor to study without distractions, he quickly finds that something darker and more sinister is hidden within those passages.

Gameplay

Exploration is the name of the game and with over 100+ rooms to search and a multitude of puzzles laid throughout the manor. You will need to collect various quest items, find notes to give the hints to help you solve puzzles, remember where key locations are, and begin breaking down every puzzle to earn a Sigil while clearing the house a little more.

One thing to keep in check is darkness itself. While you are in the dark, your sanity slowly drains. To combat this, you must either use a handheld lantern that runs off of lamp oil or light candles in various rooms with matches. Both the lamp oil and matches are limited, but the usage can be controlled by the player. To make things even easier though, lamp oil is automatically used as needed if you have some in your inventory, but don’t waste the oil because you never know when you will need the light.

You do have an inventory system of your own that you can carry with you, but it fills up pretty quickly while searching through the different bookshelves, vases, drawers, and other locations that hold goods throughout the house. Eventually, you will find a goblin-looking figure named Thillix that acts as your storage holder. He has a few locations in the manor, but the storage system is always the same. This is helpful for storing goods you aren’t using at the time, quest items, and so on. Having space in your inventory is good for collecting more material as you traverse the house, but keep equipped with stuff that may come in handy.

There is a form of fast-travel in this game as well. With a threatening manor such as this one, it is good to have an option that lets you move about the manor without having to cross through multiple rooms all over again. All you have to do is find hatches and interact with them. Once a hatch has been interacted with, it becomes available to use as a marker for fast travel from any other hatch.

Keys are pretty well set up in this game as well. There are a few different keys that you can find and make. When it comes to the skeleton key, you will have to craft it out of three brass bars and then add on the missing skeleton key pieces which are roman numeral numbers. With these pieces, you can make the skeleton key be any actual number you need it to be which is how some doors and chests are locked. Then there are keys specific for locked boxes and keys specific for locked chests, both of which you can simply find stored in random locations and they stack in your inventory. A not-a-key, but a key-item is the identifier as well which is what you will need to identify unknown books and items you find. This is mandatory as sometimes the unidentified books are notes for clues.

Then there is the crafting and potion making aspect. You can make a variety of items with the crafting kit and use the potion station to brew a variety of different potions. You will need to find the different materials and the tools to prepare them for potions, but the crafting kit you will just need to find the note that lays out how to use it. Nothing in this game is as simple as “throw it in and it gets made” and thus you will need to know how to use these key tools to make the stuff you need for progress. When it comes to potions, I ended up making a bunch of curse breaking ones and keeping those with me because when you get randomly cursed, it can sometimes be annoying to have to wait out the timer and can just drink the potion to get rid of it.

Lastly, the save system will require a sanity point from you to be used. While this sounds difficult, you can actually gain sanity points by proper exploration and staying in the light often. I ended my run with 8 sanity points due to being conservative and really didn’t need to be. If you die, you have two options: reload from your last save or use a sanity point to simply revive in the room that you are in. Note that it is possible that if you choose the revive option, you will end up in a similar room in a different part of the house, but it is not randomizing the rooms - I thought that at first, but I was really just lost from initial use. Although, I didn’t die a whole lot because it is pretty easy to avoid death aside from a few sections, so if you feel like you are going to a dangerous area or feel sketchy about a room, just go back to the nearest save and then try. Reloading a save is easier and more effective in my opinion.

Visuals

Having a top-down view is great for exploration, but I hated that they would have the camera fixate in certain sections of the game. I would rather the camera stay how it is set up the entire game unless there is a cutscene.

Graphically speaking, they didn’t go for a realism look, but it also isn’t very cartoonish. Instead, it is a middle ground between the two giving it a softcore horror visual that the atmosphere around the manor builds off of. It is a great choice for this type of game.

Sounds

There is a light musical score continuing throughout the game that just makes the environment feel a bit more vibrant than it is, but the accent sounds they add in when things happen or an apparition appears for a moment brought out the moments. They also included plenty of sound effects and special tones to give you a sense of what is going on in each room - all you have to do is keep an ear out for danger.

Replayability

This game has so much replayability! Not only do you not have to collect all sigil’s to complete the game, but I also beat the game after only finding a little over half the rooms. HALF! I was amazed to see how much of the game I had left unexplored when I reached the end because the options at the beginning of the game tell you if you are making it harder on yourself and I just answered the questions honestly and ended up with a higher completion need than before. Not to mention there are multiple endings, likely based on how many times you died, how many puzzles you solved, and how many rooms you explored.

I didn’t see a New Game Plus mode, but the game in its own right leaves you the choice of doing the bare minimum and leaving the house or going through to solve as many puzzles as you can find. It is a large home and when I beat the game with my 15 sigils, I know I have at least 6 puzzles left to complete and that is only counting the ones I was aware of. Again, I only went to a little over half of the rooms available so who knows how many puzzles there are in the house.

What Could Be Better

Some of the controls themselves were a bit wonky. Especially when I was using the keyboard and mouse to play. It is definitely easier to play with a controller, but it would be a good idea for the developers to take some time to tighten the controls a little bit further. Especially since there are sections like crossing over a series of beams that require precise movements.

As I mentioned before, I didn’t like that the camera would change for certain sections of rooms and moments. Just leave the camera as it is at all times unless there is a cutscene, no matter how short. I had reported one of the times that the camera would change after completing a puzzle and didn’t go back, but then after that was fixed I found another section with that same error. It didn’t happen again after I reloaded the save, but why have the camera do this at all when it just leaves the chance to do exactly what it does - hinder the player’s progress by getting stuck and not going back to how it is supposed to.

Conclusion

Westmark Manor is a great horror game and one I would say is a hidden gem for the indie horror scene! It definitely does a great job providing the Lovecraftian vibe throughout the game and has a wide arrange of options for the player to route with in order to complete the game. Having multiple endings, countless puzzles, and tons of rooms without making them a requirement to the story completion is something you don’t see often and is a great use of setup resources.