The Inheritance of Crimson Manor

Felt cheap from the very start, and that impression never changed. Non-rebindable controls, a loading screen every time you exit the menu, doors that close on you ridiculously quickly, a hundred drawers and cabinets to open only to find 99 of them empty, three simonsays-esque "puzzles" that are just meant to be bruteforced, an abrupt ending that I did not even realize I was about to trigger, and many other minor but compounding annoyances. Completed in only 5 hours, it feels like most of that time was spent running around trying to open visually nondescript doors to find the one door I could now open with a new key. I could maybe give the game some slack if it was cheaper, but at the asking full price of £16? Absolutely not. Your money is much better spent elsewhere.

I only played this for 10 minutes, so take this with a grain of salt, but everything about this experience screamed "low quality, low budget, poorly made." Instead of a developer logo on the splash screen, there should be a neon sign flashing: "we don't know what we're doing." The prologue scenes are un-animated, unvoiced, and have badly written (clunky/awkward/barely grammatical) text describing the scenario. It's then very hard to just naturally play the game and explore the foyer to the manor. Some things are low to the ground, but there's no crouch. Some things you have to click on several times before the respond. There's a difference between "interact" and "examine" for some reason. Some things go in your inventory, some don't. When you examine something close up, often it's not clear why the game allows it. The documents you find feel extremely low-effort & phoned in (newspapers etc). Hilariously, the first thing you find is a missing door knob, and it goes to a SLIDING DOOR. On the SteamDeck, the game seems to arbitrarily switch between showing you gamepad commands and keyboard commands, and nothing about the controller layout is clear or intuitive. This game is fumbling very, very basic stuff. I got this for 90% off and decided right away that 'value for money' isn't even the right question. I would not spend time on this if it were free. If you want a spooky gothic-manor mystery, grab The Seance of Blake Manor instead.

Picked up in sale for $4; feels about right. Game has potential but the general movement, camera, and interaction is clunky and awkward. It's hard to explain but interacting with the world just feels _off_ compared to games like The Room or House Da Vinci. You cannot basic control options mid-game; you encounter a loading screen when going to and from the Options screen. There's quite a bit of fighting mechanics rather than solving puzzles; once I have the Ballroom Key and I interact with the Ballroom Door I expect it to open, don't make me open inventory, find the key, equip the key, close the inventory, and interact with the lock. That's not puzzle-solving it's just tedium. There are some position-triggers that really should be gaze-detection/look-triggers; a minor puzzle solved itself and updated my journal without me noticing why. I used a community-patch to increase the mouse-sensitivity. Game is unplayable without it. I didn't play for very long but it did not grip me. I may return to it.

─── 【 Target Audience 】 ─── ☐ Toddlers ☐ Sweaty competitive gamers ☑ People who enjoy snooping through a dead rich man's mail ☐ Actual ghosts living in the mansion ─── 【 Graphics 】 ─── ☐ Minecraft with low render distance ☐ Decent enough to see the dust on the piano ☑ Good (The wood textures look expensive) ☐ So real I tried to physically grab the doorknob ─── 【 Price 】 ─── ☐ Free (Unlike Hadley Strange's medical bills) ☐ Worth every penny ☑ Wait for a sale so you have money left for therapy ☐ Refund simulator ─── 【 PC Requirements 】 ─── ☐ A smart toaster ☑ A standard potato ☐ High-end gaming rig ☐ Whatever NASA used to calculate the launch of Voyager 1 ─── 【 Difficulty 】 ─── ☐ Press 'E' to win ☐ Mild critical thinking ☑ Brain melting (You will start muttering Latin phrases to yourself) ☐ Requires an actual degree in 19th-century locksmithing ─── 【 Game Length 】 ─── ☐ Shorter than my attention span ☑ 3-4 hours (Perfect length before the mansion's wallpaper starts talking to you) ☐ Long enough to experience a mid-life crisis ☐ Infinite loop ─── 【 Bugs 】 ─── ☐ Flawless victory ☑ The Hamlet book puzzle will violently gaslight you into thinking you forgot how to spell ☐ Cyberpunk 2077 launch day vibes ☐ The bugs are an intentional feature of the laboratory ─── 【 Fun Factor 】 ─── ☐ I would rather watch paint dry ☐ Mildly entertaining ☑ Highly satisfying when a secret door finally goes *click* ☐ Emotional damage ✍️ Summary: "Come for the inheritance, stay because you physically cannot figure out how to open a basic wooden cabinet without finding three blood samples, a clock gear, and a ballerina dancer first."

This could have been an amazing game. The manor looks really cool there are a lot of details, the story seems interesting (though it kinda got lost between everything else), the puzzles were okay. What really bugged me was that for every puzzle you have to find a clue or some item in one corner of the house only to then walk to the complete other end of the house to use said thing. It felt llike the most common puzzle was figuring out where the thing you found was supposed to go. Without the endless back and forth throught he manor, the game would have been over in 2 hours max and I perosnally would have prefered that. Because after walking the same 2 corridors for the 50th time, I got really tired of the whole thing and only continued because a guide told me I was close to the end. Even though I played for less than 5 hours, I had already forgotten most of the story because my brain was mostly concered with finding the quickest way to the next room. In the end, I was mostly frustrated and couldn't apprechiate the story or the cool looking manor anymore.

𝑮𝒖𝒛𝒆𝒍, 𝒕𝒂𝒎 𝒌𝒊𝒗𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒂

Honestly? I liked it. But I'll admit I bought it when it was on sale, at full price I wouldn't bother. Non remappable keys, the hint system is bit odd. But at sale price? Yeah I can recommend it. Non-linear puzzle where you can tackle any puzzles in order and finding keys to unlock the parts of mansion was fun enough. All in all good way to spend couple of hours.

After getting like 95% of the map unlocked the game decided to lag rendering whenever I entered a new room and now I am stuck in a completely unloaded room with nothing to interact with and no way to get out of it. Looks like if I want to finish this game I will need to start over from scratch. As for the gameplay, I was not happy about the interaction controls where you need to have an item "equipped" in your hand when you click on something. It really should give you the option to open your inventory when you click on something.

This looked promising so I bought it but.. You're basically roaming along the halls of a giant manor with little guidance of what to do. It wasn't what I thought it was.