Review: The Horror at Highrook
Full disclosure: I’m not really a fan of the occult. Be it vampires, ghosts, or Lovecraft, it’s a bit of a hard sell for me, as far as themes go. Which is to say that The Horror at Highrook from Nullpointer Games might already be starting at something of a disadvantage with this review.
My immediate instinct was that Highrook would be a more structured Cultist Simulator: instead of a game that’s trying to melt your brain, one that wants to guide you through a story with some neat, if not similar, card-placing mechanics. The aforementioned theme certainly helps with that parallel, I’m sure I’m not the first or last to draw it, but I’m yet to see anyone comparing The Horror at Highrook with Stacklands. Point is, it’s easy to see where the comparison comes from, but it doesn’t really tell the full story.
Image: Nullpointer Games
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Developer: Nullpointer Games
Publisher: Nullpointer Games, Outersloth
Release: 1 May 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 18,49€/$19.99/£15.49
The Horror at Highrook sees the player take their group of four cross-guild investigators to look into the goings on at the Highrook Estate. The city’s council have sent them there after the well-known (though evidently not well-regarded) Ackeron family have, seemingly, vanished. While the team may not always see eye-to-eye, each of them come with expertise in six of the game’s thirteen attributes. You’ve not got strength and agility here, though: instead the skills are altogether more unorthodox. Doctor Caligar is an expert in the likes of Substances and Incantations, Atticus Hawk in Sensations and Victuals. The majority of the rooms in the Highrook Estate are associated with one of these skills, as are the action cards that players find throughout their playthrough. The core gameplay loop involves placing these cards in their corresponding room, and actioning it with one of the characters. Technically speaking this can be anyone, and there are rare occasions where you might want (or indeed need) to use someone without proficiency in the given field, but you’ll usually be matching those characters up with what they’re best at.
The theming works very well – despite Paths, Roots or Secrets not meaning much to players at the start of their playthrough, it quickly makes sense that the brutish Atticus would excel at the actions associated with them; that Scholar Vitali might find himself more comfortable working on Dreams than Devices. The flavour provided by these unfamiliar skills is perhaps one of my favourite things in the game: a relatively small consideration that contributes greatly to the ominous feeling that there’s something off-kilter in this world: that there’s a weirdness that we as the players are not going to be quite able to familiarise ourselves with.
Image: Nullpointer Games
In initially assigning my characters to their tasks I encountered my first issue: namely, banging my head against the wall while they repeatedly told me that “perhaps we should focus our efforts elsewhere for a while.” I, in turn, would shout at them that I’d only just bloody sent them to that room and they should stop making excuses and get on with their jobs. It took me a while to recognise that my problem lay with the fact that the majority of cards have a tag at the bottom – “Max 1” or, occasionally “Max 2/3," telling you quite plainly that, if you’ve already got that card, you’re not going to get any more. What my characters were trying to tell me, which I was repeatedly missing, was that I already had everything that location or action card had to offer; there was nothing to gain from exploring it any further at that time.
Admittedly, as stated, the game does tell you that – you just have to be quite observant. At least, more observant than I was for the first couple of hours of my playthrough. Once I’d cracked that, the game ran a lot smoother for me, the frustration dissipated, and I enjoyed myself a lot more. The problem had likely also been exacerbated by my insistence on ensuring all the characters were always up to something: I was focussing on wasted seconds, but sometimes there just wouldn’t be anything for a particular person to do for a short while, until their colleagues had discovered the secrets of another item or room.
The gameplay is engaging enough: it personally clicks for me as a board game fan, particularly one who enjoys worker placement games, but it doesn’t progress much across the course of a playthrough. There might be an extra step or two to completing an action in the late-game, but it never presents much of a challenge to its players. Which is fine, and not what the game is aiming to do: for the six hours or so I spent on Highrook it was more than adequate. The game’s specific mechanics aren’t really the hook for this one: instead they’re the unique method through which the narrative is delivered.
Image: Nullpointer Games
That narrative is mostly linear, but, without revealing any spoilers, players are presented with a choice towards the end of the game. You can pick from, effectively, one of a handful of options – but given what they are, I’d be incredibly surprised if the vast majority of players didn’t opt for the same path I did.
I could be wrong, of course, and it will be interesting to see if some players end up going for one of the other possibilities, but for my own tastes it would have been nice for the narrative to balance things a little better, such that there wasn’t one option that seemed far more reasonable than all the others: if I had been offered more of a dilemma, rather than a feeling of “well I’m definitely choosing that.” It seemed obvious to the point that I would question why anyone would ever pick differently, outside of contrarianism, achievement-hunting, or a second run when they’re looking at what difference it makes.
A few extra lines of dialogue could have quite easily added more weight to the decision and given me something to consider – for at least a couple of the options I didn’t pick, I can readily imagine what might have been said to make them just that bit more enticing. It might seem an odd thing to zero in on, but the writing and story are otherwise excellent, and it led to an ending that was less satisfying than it could have been had I left Highrook pondering whether I’d made the right decision.
Image: Nullpointer Games
Nullpointer had already created a very refined experience by the time I got my hands on the game: in terms of bugs it is, to my knowledge, almost entirely clear of them. the only one I was certain I’d encountered was fixed before the game shipped, and a second, where I wasn’t quite sure if it was a bug or further incompetence on my part (we’ve already seen that my reading comprehension can be somewhat lacking), was fixed literally one day into release. Such attention is indicative of the dedication Tom Betts, the game’s creator, has put into Highrook — not least given that, in the days surrounding its release, he was in the throes of his own horrors in the form of kidney stones. Scholar Vitali might be a dab hand at exorcisms and incantations but, trust me on this one, I’m certain he’d be debilitated by one or two of those little bastards.
All in all, The Horror at Highrook provided a story that was well worth the entry fee, with the card-crafting gameplay holding up throughout my playthrough. I imagine for most it’ll be a “one and done” sort of deal, but there’s more than enough in that single run to be satisfied. That’s the baseline: as I said at the start of this article, the theme isn’t one that grabs me – for those more attuned to the esoteric, The Horror at Highrook could offer something very interesting indeed. To address the comparison and answer the question “is this just Cultist Simulator-lite?” – once you look past the base mechanic and the aesthetics (admittedly two fairly significant areas) it’s far from it: they’re separate entities that are trying to do two very different things. Cultist Simulator provides its players with tiny snippets of information and asks them to fill in the gaps themselves, with the ultimate goal of ‘winning’, i.e. working towards a positive ending before you’re defeated by death or despair. The Horror at Highrook is, first and foremost, telling its players a story – and it does that masterfully. It is awarded a 7.5/10 by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was provided by the developer. Didn’t this used to have a star rating?
