Posted on: November 10, 2024
mnihil
Games: 142 Reviews: 3
Poorly Designed, Generic Escape Room
I can't recommend the title in any way. The setting and plot are uninspired, unoriginal, and uninteresting. It's clearly "inspired" by Gothic Horror and Penny Dreadfuls, but mind you, Penny Dreadfuls were cheap, mass produced fiction aimed to titillate, which is very different from the literary greats like Frankenstein, Dracula, or Dorian Gray. Crimson Manor is definitely more Penny Dreadful than it is Gothic Horror classic. There are no particular themes. No characters. The conceit is given away after about 5 minutes of gameplay, with few more twists to the narrative. Even though the player explores a family's mansion, there is nothing of substance we learn about any of the characters, nor does the eponymous mansion itself have much personality either. It's all just the bare minimum. OK, but what if you don't care about the context, you just want to solve a bunch of puzzles? Most puzzles are decent to good, though none were particularly stand out or creative. However, the design overall is often poor. From UX issues like using the journal vs. inventory vs. map never becoming intuitive (watch a playthrough and you will see others struggle with this, too) to more serious issues with the puzzle design itself. First of all - the Hint System isn't a Hint System, it's a Solution System. Then, some puzzles are just trial and error. OK, there's a memorisation aspect to it, which is a form of brain teaser, that's cool. But that puzzle type appears 2 or 3 times. Sometimes the clues for the puzzles are just poorly constructed, broken, or non-existent. Sometimes this is because of the contextual issues. Everything is arbitrary. It doesn't feel like you're exploring a lived in manor, but just a puzzle box (some of this is explained loosely by Hadley Strange "testing" you, but it doesn't make sense in many contexts). Ultimately, exploring the manor felt like a slog, and the design was fighting me along the way.
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