Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches

I have a soft spot for games that reach for something genuinely obscure and weird, and Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches reaches hard. Built by a three-person team at Arberth Studios, it plants you alone in a remote Welsh farmstead called Ty Pryderi and asks you to unravel a supernatural curse rooted in the Mabinogion, a pre-Christian cycle of Welsh myths that almost no other game has dared to touch. You play as Chris, a house-sitter called in while the Sullivan family takes their troubled daughter away, and the setup is immediately more textured than the premise suggests. Diaries, emails, and letters left by the family do real narrative work, threading a contemporary ghost story through legends that are genuinely ancient. There is something quietly affecting about how invested you can become in a family you never actually meet. The gameplay sits firmly in the Myst tradition: first-person node-based navigation, an inventory that hides at the top of the screen until you need it, and puzzles that require you to combine objects and decode clues scattered across the property. The puzzle design in the first three of the game's five chapters is where Rhiannon earns its reputation. You will teach yourself the ancient Ogham alphabet, work through a puzzle built around homeopathy and Kirlian photography, and pick apart the properties of sacred trees in Welsh magic. These are the moments that make the game feel authored, like someone genuinely cared about the lore. A small notebook nudges you in the right direction without holding your hand, which is the right call for this kind of mystery. The friction, though, is real and the game does not always earn it. Objects cannot be picked up until you have triggered the correct plot condition, meaning you might stand next to a hemlock twig for twenty minutes before the game decides you are allowed to take it. Backtracking compounds this, and the late chapters lean on repetitive puzzle logic that dulls the carefully built tension. The audio is thin, closer to ambient silence than atmosphere, and the visuals have never been sharp, locked at 720p with no resolution option. There are also inventory bugs, flagged for years, that have never been corrected. A disappearing item in an adventure game is not a small problem. Who is this for, then? Fans of Barrow Hill or The Lost Crown, and anyone who has read the Mabinogion and thought it deserved a game, will find things here that no other title offers. The pacing demands patience: the opening half-hour is stingy with information and the farmhouse feels deliberately bewildering. Stick with it past that threshold. The storytelling and the folklore genuinely earn that patience, even if the production never fully catches up to the ambition. Treat a walkthrough as a companion rather than a defeat, and the experience is a lot less likely to sour.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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