Westmark Manor review

I love spending time with a group of friends and a good Lovecraftian tabletop game, from Arkham Horror to Mansions of Madness. So when a new adventure release promises to combine a lot of the aspects I enjoy from those experiences into a single-player PC game, I’m immediately interested. And indeed, one cannot accuse Nodbrim Interactive’s Westmark Manor of skimping on any particular ingredients of the familiar formula, from eldritch discoveries slowly sapping your sanity to being caught like a fly in a spider’s web of cosmic horror woven by the Ancient Ones. It’s unfortunate, then, that the game is assaulted on all fronts by pesky design decisions and a too-vague story that greatly undercut any enjoyment it seems poised to deliver.

Things begin with all the requisite Lovecraft boxes being ticked. Professor Theodore Westmark finds himself alone in the family’s sprawling manor, ruminating on his ailing wife’s malaise and on the ancient formula he’s discovered to potentially turn back time, which he now hopes will hold the key to her salvation. Little does he know that he is about to be trapped inside a dark reflection of the estate, forced to explore its poorly lit hallways and rooms in search of a way out of this nightmare, accompanied only by faint whispers of unseen souls and unbidden memories of his own haunted past. Collecting a certain number of mystical sigils from around the manor’s labyrinthine innards is required to unlock its only exit.

Westmark Manor is as much a gothic puzzle adventure as it is a survival horror title. Despite the unsettlingly creepy atmosphere (and the subtly integrated occasional glimpses of pale spectral apparitions that only the player, and not Theodore, can see) the game’s “survival” aspect involves no combat whatsoever – a lucky thing, too, as the aging professor moves with appropriate stiffness. Instead, there’s an unnecessarily heavy focus put on crafting items such as light sources, sanity potions, skeleton keys and other sundry survival tools, while limited inventory space and dwindling resources do their level best to make your life a chore in lieu of actual foes to go up against. In fact, the pendulum swings so heavily toward these latter aspects of gameplay that they quickly dwarf the actual narrative and overshadow much of the macabre enjoyment the title would otherwise have provided.

Theodore’s pockets begin to fill up as early as the first room you get to explore. Westmark Manor throws a litany of searchable hotspots at you, with each of the manor’s rooms and hallways generally featuring multiple urns, bookshelves, cupboards, and boxes, each of which can contain several objects to collect and carry around with you – and, with adventure games traditionally finding a use for even the most trivial of objects somewhere down the road, it is an ingrained habit for us to just pick everything up. Given the fact that you won’t have any idea which of these objects will be useful to your particular play style at this point, poor Theodore may start running out of inventory space within minutes of starting his trek through the house.

Depending on how much effort you’re willing to invest into learning crafting recipes and making your own potions and objects to help overcome the challenges the house throws your way, some items may end up being entirely superfluous and just sit in your inventory, transferred to the storage box (which, I was flabbergasted to find out, also has a rather limited capacity), or dropped and blinked out of existence altogether. It is advisable to reserve several inventory slots for the array of keys needed to unlock the many containers and passages within the mansion: caskets and chests offer up more items, locked doors hinder progress, clocks can be turned back to restore a bit of lost sanity, and special numbered locks require crafting unique Roman numeral skeleton keys to operate.

While keys are important tools in advancing through the estate, a number of other items are more crucial to preserving the professor’s mental state. Entering a dark area causes Westmark’s on-screen sanity meter to slowly decrease, as does witnessing certain sights; conversely, gaining valuable knowledge adds to the meter, and it is possible, through judicious play, to amass multiple sanity points, each point equating to yet another full sanity bar (the displayed number of points indicates how many full bars of sanity remain before it’s game over for Theodore).

Using a match to light a nearby candle or simply turning on the lantern Theodore carries with him can keep the darkness at bay, effectively adding two more consumable resources – matches and lantern oil – to the growing menagerie of inventory madness. Even the sanity points have been turned into a resource that must be jealously guarded, as simply saving the game (only in predetermined locations, no less) requires spending a full sanity point – possibly more if you’re unlucky enough to have triggered a curse!

If it weren’t for the constant inventory management circus and depletion of resources, exploring the mansion would have had the chance to shine brighter than it ultimately does. Westmark Manor sports some impressive production values, and while the character models won’t win any awards for cutting-edge graphics, the various interiors are all suitably gothic and well designed, and it’s nice to see the relatively frequent cinematics add moments of flair that highlight a disturbing set piece or creepy apparition. Suits of armor, moveable bookcases sliding aside to reveal hidden rooms, and small flourishes such as doors slamming closed as you approach them or a book slowly drifting off a shelf and across the room are in abundance.

The orchestrated music makes for great-sounding accompaniment to the action, making frequent use of strings and cramming in as much atmosphere as possible, though there are a fair number of heavy silences with only environmental effects propping up the mood. The voice acting is nicely done too, even if there aren’t many characters or spoken lines by virtue of the game’s lonely setting.

It’s a shame that so many locations simply boil down to picking up a couple more crafting materials; I would have loved to see the environments used more to drive the narrative along. As the story ticks by, we discover more about Theodore’s family, some tragic secrets buried in the past that are now coming back to light, but very little of it actually impacts the gameplay. We learn that Theodore and his wife had a daughter, and his relationship as a young boy with his father plays a prominent role in the current eldritch happenings in the manor, but overall I felt like an observer in a tale that I wasn’t supposed to become incredibly invested in. Most of what is here is told through cinematic flashback scenes or diary pages found while exploring.

Then there are the technical limitations that play their own lesser role in impacting the top-down third-person exploration. An in-game map and preset fast travel points at least cut down on some of the extensive tedium of going back and forth to the storage box repeatedly, but the map must be checked frequently or you could easily miss a great many doors that should be in plain view but are obscured simply due to the slightly stilted camera angle.

True to form, Theodore dodders around via a simple WASD control scheme, as an elderly man his age might, which makes the handful of precarious sections where he has to balance across exposed floor beams to avoid plunging into an interminable chasm at least tolerable. However, timing his steps carefully to evade floor panels spouting jets of fire or spike traps is imprecise at best. Any physical damage incurred here takes a toll on Theodore’s sanity meter, and once it’s depleted, only spending one of your remaining points will revive you at the entrance of the current room. Once the final sanity bar runs out, you’ll have to load a previous save to continue.

Depending on your tolerance for the hoops the game expects you to jump through, Westmark Manor will offer varied levels of enjoyment. It’s possible to alter just how challenging and thorough your adventure needs to be, after a fashion. A series of pre-game multiple-choice questions, for instance, impact the amount of inventory space and stamina you have, or how many sigils – trophies obtained by solving specific puzzles or making certain critical discoveries – you’ll have to collect in order to trigger the game’s ending.

Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear how some of these responses impact the game, and it would have been far more convenient to have some simple menu choices available instead. Having to painstakingly scour every nook and cranny for clues to the more cryptic puzzles – some rooms are devoted to working out a specific order to press switches in or interpret the signs of the zodiac in a particular way – may be appealing to some, but after an initial attempt that failed miserably with a bloated inventory and not enough remaining sanity, I started over and opted for settings that let me finish the entire thing in a short three to four hours and be done with it.

I like many of the ideas behind Westmark Manor . . . on paper. A game that emulates the exploration and overall creepy atmosphere of some of my favorite Lovecraftian board games sounds like a swell time. And these aspects are actually enjoyable here, especially with some nice presentation values backing them up. But having to wrestle with the deluge of consumable resources and ingredients for the requisite item-creation system, not to mention the constant hassle of juggling things from Theodore’s limited inventory to the storage box and back again, seriously got in the way of the fun and sucked my sanity from me far faster than any eldritch creature ever could. In the end, like Theodore Westmark, I made it my mission to accomplish what was required to get out of the manor and haven’t looked back since.