Wayward Manor

I wanted so badly for this one to be a hidden gem. A 1920s haunted manor, Gaiman's voice drifting through the rooms like smoke, cartoon grotesques with oversized heads and toadlike eyes shuffling from room to room while you play the disembodied poltergeist tasked with scaring them out. The aesthetic pitch is genuinely lovely: whimsical, macabre, faintly Burton-esque, with a tone that sits somewhere between Coraline and a dusty old radio serial. And then you actually start clicking things, and the air goes out of it fast. The core loop across five floors of the Wayward Manor puts you above each room, possessing glowing objects - knocking bottles off rafters, rattling windows to blow things across the floor, activating a mounted lion head to roar at Grandpa Budds, pivoting tiki statues to redirect crossbow bolts through candle flames. Each fright fills a target's spook meter, and once it's full they flee. Sounds like a recipe for satisfying slapstick. The problem is that the puzzle design never builds on itself in any meaningful way. By the third floor you are doing the same things you were doing in the attic, and the nine inhabitants - the sugar-obsessed children, the vain matron, the gun-waving grandfather, the maid with her dusting routes - never grow complex enough to demand fresh thinking. The optional "secret scare" challenges, which ask you to set up specific multi-step interactions (trick the burglar into destroying every piece of china, for instance), are the closest the game gets to genuine puzzle craft, but they sit around the edges of an experience that is otherwise content to let you brute-force rooms by clicking every glowing object in sequence. Gaiman's narration, delivered from the perspective of the house itself, is dry and sardonic in the way only he can manage, and the art by Eisner-winning artist Chuck BB gives the Budds family a pleasantly grotesque silhouette. Each character also has a musical instrument theme that shifts as they move and react, which is a charming idea in theory. In practice the themes are short loops that layer unpleasantly when multiple characters share a room. There are also no subtitle options for the narration, and the volume sliders reportedly do not function correctly - the kind of polish problems that suggest the PC version was not the primary target, and the game was indeed designed with tablet platforms in mind, with the letterboxed interface and mouse-only controls to prove it. The technical side is genuinely rough. Glitches that freeze puzzle states and force level restarts were reported widely at launch and never fully resolved. Objects fail to register clicks. The final cutscenes were auto-skipping on release day. For a two-to-three hour experience, running into a hard freeze more than once and having to restart a level five times on the final puzzle is not a minor inconvenience - it is a significant fraction of your total time with the game. The critics were unkind (Metacritic sits at 41), and the handful of Steam users who weighed in landed at a mixed 57%, which feels about right. There is something worthwhile buried in here for the most patient Gaiman devotees who want to hear his voice inhabit one of his moody little stories. But that audience deserves better craft around those moments, and this release never delivers it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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