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Update 20/02/2025: This post was updated to clarify language regarding allegations against Alexis Kennedy and include a link to his denial.
It’s easy to lose moments watching the ambience of the gameboard change in the demo for haunted house RPG The Horror At Highrook. The colours alter from daytime greyness through winey shades of sunset into pale lavender moonlight. There are little details to notice and zoom on: a fleeting embroidery of rain, the seep of flames in the kitchen and guest rooms, a fidgeting of moths in the archives. Ah, nice. The last time I felt so beguiled by a view of a house was while looking out from the hamlet of Darkest Dungeon.
You can’t just sit and stare, however. Left idle, your characters will grow hungry, fatigued and unhinged, while useful items such as potent breeds of fungus will disintegrate. So move your cards around. Put somebody in the kitchen to make a meal out of that sack of grain you found, while somebody else combs the archives for the door code to the locked laboratory, and somebody else fumbles around in the courtyard with a trowel.
Once your party’s basic needs are met, you can spare a thought for the mysteries of the game’s house, beginning with the disappearance of the Ackeron family who once lived here. Notes hint at secrets in the sealed chapel and deep underground. Tunnels and “tears” and worrying designs upon the walls. Yes, this is like Darkest Dungeon in many more ways than one.
It’s also quite a lot like Cluedo, if Cluedo has been written by Poe or Lovecraft. In The Horror At High Rook, you plonk your characters down in rooms and give them items so they can complete tasks, ranging from deciphering books to running a spyglass over the crags beneath the mansion. These tasks have resource requirements corresponding to character stats, which can be amplified by means of other, supporting cards – some representing artefacts, some “visions”, tendencies, qualities.
The “Gift of the Bee”, for example, might help your plague doctor Caligula with her lab work. “My blood buzzes, as if my body is a hive,” the card description explains, adding “I am in awe of the simple alchemies of the everyday”. There’s another “vision” card with simian properties that makes life easier in the machine shop, ensuring that your Mecanist always finds the correct spanner at her elbow.
These representations of the paranormal, together with the visual design of the cards themselves, put me heavily in mind of Cultist Simulator – a game I loved but haven’t played since its primary creator, Alexis Kennedy, was accused of abuse by several women (allegations he has denied). I’m still thinking about how that association shapes my feelings about The Horror Of Highrook. It’s very much a case of one game being haunted by another.
The writing so far is wordier than you’d find in Cultist Simulator – a bit too opulent when you’re trying to process a bunch of card timers or attend to several characters who need resting or feeding, but there’s always the pause button. There are some more obvious rough edges. Atticus Hawk, the streetwise muscle in my group of occult investigators, has an accent I can’t quite hear in my head. Is he from Blighty or the States? It feels like the developer, former Big Robot lead programmer Tom Betts, hasn’t quite decided. But perhaps I just need to get used to Atticus. I’ve barely played this game for half-an-hour and there are many more layers to peel away.
Read more and find the demo on Steam. For something similar and yet totally different, try the demo for Blue Prince.
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