Withering Rooms

I went in expecting a glorified haunted house with roguelite window dressing and got something far weirder and more considered than that. Withering Rooms casts you as Nightingale Williams, a teenage girl committed to the Mostyn House asylum in 1892 who wakes each night into a dream world soaked in sorcery and occupied by genuinely unsettling things: decaying horses, legless corpses, mutated nurses, axe-wielding madmen, and spell-slinging witches who all want her very specifically dead. The setting is not flavour text bolted onto a combat loop. The mansion's history, its trapped residents, its cursed keeper Robert Blackett, the ancient idol underpinning the whole nightmare - these bleed into every interaction. Fragments of story are scattered in rooms you have to physically find, and the game has multiple endings that push you toward different choices on repeat runs. It is not Disco Elysium in terms of writing density, but for a solo-developer project released in April 2024, the narrative ambition is real and earns its atmosphere. The systems layer is where Withering Rooms gets interesting and occasionally frustrating in equal measure. There are no classes. Instead, you stack rings, amulets, charms, and armour pieces to shape a playstyle: spell damage builds lean on crafted scrolls and jars, dexterity builds focus on thrown projectiles, and melee builds are viable but frankly underpowered until New Game Plus hands you the Starry Greatsword. Early-game melee feels sluggish - the dodge roll is slow, hitboxes are unforgiving, and a cursed lifesteal build with the Vampire Locket only comes online well into the run. The smarter path through most of the game is to treat throwables and magic as primary tools and save melee for cleanup. That's a real constraint on build fantasy in the opening hours, and the game does a poor job of explaining mechanics like poise, crafting tolerances, or the altar system that lets you "remember" items across deaths. Discovery-by-dying is the intended tutorial, which will charm some players and alienate others. Where the game holds up under pressure is its environmental design and the way procedural generation is used with restraint. The layout of Mostyn House stays structurally consistent so story-critical rooms remain findable, but background details, item placements, and enemy compositions shuffle each night. Enemies respawn, which keeps the tension alive rather than letting the mansion go quiet halfway through. The broader world beyond the mansion - hedge mazes, tombs, a Byzantine labyrinth below the grounds, caves, churches, ruins - adds genuine scope that the roguelite label undersells. Boss fights are punishing in ways that feel authored rather than random, and at least one mid-game boss (the church encounter specifically) is the kind of wall that demands a proper loadout or twenty attempts with different gear. That friction is mostly earned, and the altar system for preserving specific items across runs gives you just enough agency over progression to prevent it from feeling pointless. The caveats worth flagging: combat responsiveness is the consistent complaint across reviewers and the community, and it is not unfair. If snappy action is the main draw for you, this will feel clunky. Some systems - poise especially - are explained only if you find the right document, which is the sort of design philosophy that respects player curiosity but taxes player patience. Nightingale is a silent protagonist, and while the surrounding cast of trapped, manipulative dream residents is memorably unhinged, her own interiority is minimal enough to leave some story threads feeling undercooked. None of this kills the experience, but it does mean Withering Rooms rewards players willing to read every note they find and treat the opacity as texture rather than sloppiness.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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