Wayward Manor

This little puzzle game has its appeal. What I really enjoy is being able to get the achievements for the different levels AFTER I have gained all of the skulls. It doesn't make you start over the level from the beginning like other puzzle games. Anything that makes getting achievements easier is a good thing in my book.

I was disappointed enough with this game that I just stopped playing. The concept is cute, and the art is lovely, but the actual gameplay is dull, and it's rather buggy still. Honestly, I bought it because Gaiman's name is attached to it, and I'm finding myself regretful

[b]I'll try and keep this as spoiler-free as I can. Some of it might not make sense as I am very tired at the time of writing.[/b] Well, this is disappointing. As an idea, it sounds pretty cool. You get to be a ghost in a manor, manipulating objects to scare people. And it's written by Neil Gaiman! It has to be at least [i]okay[/i], right? Unfortunately, no. I've played the game for, admittedly, not a very long time. But the short time I did have with it, before closing it from boredom, was not really enjoyable at all. Let's start with the basics. Wayward Manor's intro features Neil Gaiman giving me a somewhat lackluster reading of the talking Manor's thoughts and feelings about life. Gaiman doesn't sound like he's trying to play the part of the Manor here; if anything it's what I imagine a tired father reading aloud to his children, who aren't really paying attention, sounds like. The words themselves are perfectly fine. The delivery isn't. Onto the gameplay. One word that comes to mind is bland. Another is repetetive. As a ghost you can manipulate objects in each stage to get a scare out of the characters in said stage. You start off being able to manipulate only precariously placed bottles of poison (I'm talking balanced on rafters and swinging from ropes). I understand that scaring people with these makes you more powerful in the room, able to play with more items. What I don't really get is why only some bottles are available to you at the start; it seems arbitrary and just "because we said so." to me. As the stages progress you get access to more of the objects, which sounds great. I think the problem is that you can still only interact with one thing at once, leaving combo potential almost out of the window. There are a few things set up in the stage that combo together but apart from those select few things, you're just left clicking on objects and hoping that the characters in the room will react in the way you want them to. It would be brilliant if you could move items around, using your own creativity to set up a big scare. But, no. All you can do is click things until you find two objects that interact with each other. An example of above is a stage early on in the game. One character is walking around a room, cleaning it. Pretty much the only thing that you can do is make a rat run around. So it just becomes this tedium of making the character move to a different spot in the level, making the rat run out in front of them, rinse and repeat. Now, I'm not really one to harp on about graphics in a game. But I will say this; Wayward Manor is not beautiful by any means. The character models are weird and sometimes glitch out or just walk through each other like they are the real ghosts here. A boy was meant to be hiding from a maid, but several times the boy ran out, stood [i]inside[/i] the maid, and ran away. In the settings menu the only graphical option there is is to change the resolution. Not a huge problem but some antialiasing couldn't have gone amiss. I like Neil Gaiman. I like puzzle games. What I do not like is slow, boring, repetetive and simple puzzles with, honestly, some very un-Gaiman-quality writing. I was looking forward to this game, and I am very disappointed.

I LOVE Wayward Manor!! It's not hard to play and still very entertaining. I really like the music and the graphics. The story is original. I definitely recommend this game!!

Horrible game. I backed it up on Kickstarter and it was a huge disappointment and they're selling it for more than it's actually worth. Neil Gaiman backed it up because it really looked promising on Kickstarter. I expected better from them. The bugs, sounds effects, and game design itself reminds me of the horrible ROM games of the 1990's but Barbie did a better job of entertaining me. Huge amount of bugs, I couldn't get passed Chapter 2 level 2

Wayward Manor has a certain charm, and some quirky humour. There is a lot of competition in the mobile style puzzle genre, and it holds up moderately well. You will be performing the same tasks repeatedly, but there is variation in how you accomplish them. My main ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ are that the camera angles aren't always ideal, and the rather limited voice overs. It advertises with narration by Neil Gaiman, but this is only during very short cutscenes. The main game has no voice overs at all. For a mobile game that would be iffy, but on pc this just feels rather lackluster. All in all I would say this is worth picking up, but perhaps only during a sale. This game might also make more sense on mobile/tablet, so you might want to wait for that release instead.

Fun Fun and more Fun. Love the music and the art style. Very cute and entertaining. Seems like they fixed the bug issues. Looks bug free to me. Give it a try!

SpOoooKy! Love the cut scenes with Neil's reading. The puzzles are kooky in nature and I loved discovering the characters strange personalities. Lots of cute little effects that made me smile. some replayability with the achievements as well, but they're awefully tough to get them all.

The Odd Gentlemen is the studio that was behind The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Winterbottom was perhaps not the most extraordinary indie puzzle platformer, but it was fun and had some clever design ideas and, most importantly, was about a dude that really loved pie. Neil Gaiman is the author behind Stardust, one of my favorite fantasy novels, and The Sandman, one of the best comic series of all time according to everyone and their mothers (except for Neil Gaiman’s mom, strangely enough, who had always hoped her son would grow up to be a lawyer). Both of these entities have shown themselves of being very capable in their field in the past is the point I’m trying to get accross. And yet, Wayward Manor is bad. Not just bad, but terrible. It is hard to believe this partnership resulted in this mess, but Wayward Manor is a wreck, top to bottom. You start off as a restless spirit trapped in a treasure chest. How does a ghost get trapped in a treasure chest? Maybe it’s a magical ghost holding chest or maybe it’s on loan from the Ghostbusters or maybe you were not trapped and were just a particularly lazy ghost, who knows. Regardless of how you got stuck in there, you spend your existence trapped in it until a young girl from the family living there opens it ever so slightly, giving you the chance you need to escape. Now that you have escaped, you can move around from object to object manipulating them in such a way as to scare away the various members of the current family living there until just you and the house remain. This works out great because the house (played by Neil Gaiman) also happens to hate the annoying group of dorks currently living there and messing up its very nice interior. Overall, it is a simple, boring story without any charm to it, making it genuinely surprising that Gaiman was the author behind it. Once you get to the gameplay though, it becomes pretty obvious that Gaiman isn’t the only person who mailed it in. The game is divided up into a series of 27 different levels, each with one of a handful of the different inhabitants to scare. Each level is essentially one room that starts off with two or three different objects you can possess by clicking on them. Possessing them causes them to wiggle or fall or something, which will usually cause the human characters in the area to react in some way. You want to interact with things in the right order or at the right time to scare the person in the room. For example, you can make a tiger head roar when an old man is in the right area, and he will shoot an arrow towards it, knocking over the candle and causing the room to go dark. Once you trigger enough scares, other objects in the room will become interactable, allowing for new and different scares. Each room gives you multiple ways to scare its inhabitants (although they tend to top off around ten or so), and once you find six you can trigger the big scare. Things in the room will swirl around, the person flees the room, and you are forced to play another level. Truly terrifying stuff. It seems like an interesting idea at first, sort of like a miniature twist on the point-and-click adventure game genre but it quickly becomes obvious they don’t really have enough ideas to build a full game out of its single trick. The first level has you moving around small rooms in an attic, tricking a burglar into running into plates in what feels like a solid enough introductory level. Then you get to the next area and things are essentially the same and you realize the game developers didn’t have enough ideas to fill out ten solid minutes. The game never progresses beyond its simple premise, and most of the scares are so obvious you will be able to figure things out right away. The whole game is nothing but these simple little tasks that I hesitate to even call puzzles because of how straightforward they all are. With so few things to click on, most of these levels just sort of solve themselves without you even thinking about it. Additionally, despite how short the game is, it repeats itself endlessly. Get the wife’s dress dirty, give a little girl her stuffed toy, make the father dance around, rinse, repeat, try not to doze off. Every level featuring a character has almost identical scares for you to solve and some levels even have you doing the same thing multiple times. The furniture might move around some but its always the same basic idea, and once you figure out something one time it is basically guaranteed you will do the same thing a dozen more times before the game is over. I figure out I could drop a bottle on their heads like ten minutes in, it wasn’t necessary to make me do it twenty more times. There is just no cleverness to any of the gameplay, and while the idea behind this is solid it quickly becomes clear The Odd Gentlemen couldn’t think of a good way to implement it in the actual game. Beyond that, the game just looks very shoddily made. The visuals are just bad, and looks like they belong in a shovelware title for the PS2. Weird little visual miscues are found throughout the entire game, with poorly timed animations or mistakes so bad they might as well be glitches. Candles light way too early compared with the animation, or a glass will be knocked over and still appear standing up. The game is also tremendously glitchy, and I lost track of how many times I had to restart a level because the game got stuck. Similarly, the musical score is entirely forgettable and even Gaiman’s narration feels bored and uninterested. I am still confused how the combination of The Odd Gentlemen and Neil Gaiman, two things that I enjoyed on their own, would up generating this gurgling monstrosity that is basically begging for you to kill it. It would be like if Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up to do a movie and then it turned out to be three hours of them going around and kicking baby seals. It just doesn’t add up. Great plus good shouldn’t equal smelly dumpster fire, but I’ve checked my math here several times and I’m absolutely positive that’s the case. The story is bad. The gameplay is somehow worse. And that’s during the half the time where everything works and the game hasn’t gotten itself stuck in a corner again. Everything is just bad, with nothing positive to say about the game at all from top to bottom. There is no fun to be had here, no entertainment to be gleaned no matter how hard you try and scrape some out. I can not recommend avoiding this experience enough, as “wayward” doesn’t even begin to describe it.