True terror doesn’t happen in jumpscares and musical stings. It doesn’t leap out and gnash its teeth in your face or drag you kicking and screaming; true terror is the creeping dread you remember late at night when you *really* should be sleeping.
There are plenty of games that take the slow-burn route to horror, and from the Steam Next Fest demo, this is squarely where The Horror at Highrook looks to lay its hat. The closest comparison in my book would be Cultist Simulator — the Lovecraftian card development game that has you building your fledgling outcast society.
In The Horror at Highrook, you’ll manage a group of occult investigators looking to uncover dark secrets or die trying. This happens through cards that give clues to the overall mystery; you’ll have to manage your investigators as they starve, don’t sleep or go mad as they plumb the depths of forbidden knowledge.
All Aboard! It’s Mystery Time
The Horror at Highrook could very easily have been a physical board game, and the demo wears that comparison on its sleeve. Your adventure takes place in one house, the titular Highrook Manor. Your group of occult investigators — Mechanist, Plague Doctor, Scholar and Thug — arrive to investigate the disappearance of the house’s previous occupants.
The Ackeron family was a seemingly ordinary aristocratic family until rumours of dark pacts and fiendish rituals began to swirl around them. They then disappeared without a trace, and you’re here to find out what happened.
On the board, you’ll see the house itself, and you can place your investigators in each room to get to work or care for themselves — whether that means eating, sleeping or drinking alcohol to quell the rising whispers of the house. Each room’s purpose is tied to cards that you’ll be investigating. You might find a coded book and send your scholar to research it, this could lead to a locked case that your mechanist needs to crack into, or a mysterious plant that your plague doctor must refine into a potion.
It’s a constant push and pull between the mysteries you’re uncovering and keeping your investigators fed, refreshed and not slowly going mad. While the external threats are minimal in the early stages of the demo — and it’s relatively early to balance your investigators needs — I hope this balancing act becomes more taxing in the final version.
After all, what’s the point of madness if no one goes mad?
The Art of Darkness
Visually, The Horror at Highrook feels very refined. It knows it wants to feel like a board game, and it lands that feeling in earnest. As I was playing through the house, I kept thinking back to physical board games like Betrayal at House on the Hill that has a similar visual and thematic style.
As you progress, you’ll unlock scraps of notes from the members of the Ackeron family. The father is looking to uncover the secrets of curing his son’s mysterious illness, and the son is becoming more frightened of his father’s obsession. Each of these notes is hand-written and feel like scraps of larger texts. There’s no voice acting here, so get your reading glasses out — we have ancient libraries to delve through!
The house itself is a static board that expands as you unlock more rooms, and the cards are all individual icons that represent letters, food, arcane implements and more. The art here is wonderfully realised and is really on show in the character portraits and major story beats. The detailed yet dark hand-drawn style brings a lot of flavour to the individual characters.
The scholar, in particular, starts the game already looking like he’s four cans of Red Bull into an occult textbook marathon and is ready to collapse in a heap or see if he really can fly.
Reading Between The Lines
The story is told wonderfully so far; the writing has the right air of old-world flair that feels like a mad old man writing to himself in an Edgar Allen Poe story. The sense of creeping dread is thick like fog on the moors.
While you’re following the trail of the Ackeron family, you get the feeling that in order to follow, you’ll need to make the same mistakes they made; you’ll feel that dissonance between the player knowing it’s a bad idea to take a sleeping draft to dream on the secrets of the ancient book you found, and the character urging you forward.
Uncovering the secrets of the house is the objective, and it feels like you might have to break a few eggs to make that omelette — eggs being your ordinary human characters, and the omelette being the horrifying truths of occult enlightenment.
This Steam Next Fest demo is a bite-sized chunk of The Horror at Highrook, but the vibes are all here. This spooky title has spectacular art, and a written style that feels like you’re peering into madness (in the best way). After playing the demo, I can’t wait to see the terrors unfold in the full game when it releases.
Check out the demo for The Horror at Highrook over at Steam Next Fest.
