Have you been yearning for a horror game similar to the Rusty Lake games but different? If so, then Peanut Button’s Riddlewood Manor may be the game you’re looking for. It’s a point-and-click adventure with a ton of puzzles and plenty of horror elements (including one jump scare that actually made me jump!).
In terms of disclosures: The very small team (according to their LinkedIN page, Peanut Button has under 10 employees – and the end credits to Riddlewood Manor had only eight names!) who made Riddlewood Manor reached out to me last month with a free copy of their game, hoping I’d write about it. I could have added it to one of my Indie Horror Inbox Roundups, but I actually wanted to play the game, not just announce its existence (Riddlewood Manor was on my Steam Wishlist and was something I was thinking to get anyway!). So, there were zero expectations for a full review and I received zero monetary compensation, but I did get the game itself for free. However, if YOU decide to get Riddlewood Manor, it won’t support HorrorFam.com or me financially in any way. This review isn’t sponsored and the links to their game aren’t affiliate links.
With the legal stuff out of the way, let me tell you about Riddlewood Manor!
The Plot of Riddlewood Manor (No Spoilers!)
You begin Riddlewood Manor much like Disco Elysium – you don’t remember who you are or what you look like, but you hear a dreamlike voice calling to you from the Void. You awaken outside an obviously VERY haunted house. There’s a group of people praying behind you, and three priests beside you. Each priest offers you a gift (inventory item) with one sentence of advice apiece that will impact how you play for the rest of the game: “The light will protect you,” “take good care of the dragon,” and “don’t fear the end.”
Through visual context clues and (rare) snippets of dialogue, you learn that you need to go through the haunted manor, cleanse it of all the ghosts and demons occupying it, and find out just what the heck happened. Something took out the entirety of the Riddlewood family – but what, why, and how??
As you solve puzzles to exorcise dark spirits, you’ll unravel what happened to Ma & Pa Riddlewood and their daughter, Emily. You’ll also become well-acquainted with Emily’s favorite doll, Suzie, who serves as both one of the biggest mysteries and scare factors in Riddlewood Manor.
Riddlewood Manor’s Gameplay
If you’re familiar with the Rusty Lake games or other “Escape the Room” style games, Riddlewood Manor will have an intuitive look/feel to its gameplay. However, due to its art style and positioning of you as the player character, Riddlewood Manor’s gameplay is more like you’re actually in the environments. I thought that was really neat! The additional level of immersion helped to up the horror factor since I felt like I was there, rather than a completely safe outsider, casually sitting in my room, manipulating the objects in a distant world I somehow had access to through my screen.
If you’re unfamiliar with this game’s playstyle genre: Essentially, you’re put into a new “room”/area of gameplay that’s a cube. You can turn to look at/interact with all four “walls” and, to some extent, the ceiling and floor of each new area. You can zoom in, you can poke at things, you can pick up things (which get added to your inventory), and then you try to solve puzzles (using clues you’ve seen or items you’ve gathered) to unlock new areas/rooms/cubes to progress physically and narratively.
However, that’s where the similarities between Riddlewood Manor and the Rusty Lake games ends. Riddlewood Manor added a lot of new, fresh gameplay elements that successfully separated it into its own Thing, rather than a reskinned clone of what’s come before.
Remember the third piece of advice you get within your first minute of gameplay? “Don’t fear the end.” And you WILL end. Over and over and over and over again. “There is only one way out” and you’ll be dying repeatedly in order to succeed.
Riddlewood Manor isn’t just a point-and-click adventure, nor is it just an “escape the room” puzzle game — it’s a roguelike.
To reach the end, YOU have to end. Get as far as you can in the room(s) you have access to, take the one way out, and try again. Any significant changes you made to the environment will be saved, everything else resets.
Riddlewood Manor Also Has Mini-Games
In addition to the “usual” use-an-item-to-unlock-a-thing and remember-the-code-you-saw-for-later gameplay, Riddlewood Manor also has a fair number of mini-games!
You’ll suddenly find yourself playing Connect Four or playing a Western-themed version of the “Chrome Dino” game in order to progress. Depending on your mindset (and reflexes), some of these games will be more welcomed than others. An embarrassing chunk of my gametime was dedicated to trying to get a toy cowboy to successfully jump over cacti and duck under vultures. But, for the most part, the mini-games were fun! It was nice to have a little variety in the gameplay, and they tended to be silly – which gives you a chance to come up for air in an atmosphere that’s laden with dread.
My One Beef with Riddlewood Manor
What I’m about to say may not bother you if you’re not someone who strives for Perfection or cares about Achievements. I, however, do care. That’s not to say that I’m successful in my Completionist endeavors all – or even most – of the time, but I do strive for it if it feels at all possible for my skill level. And Riddlewood Manor felt doable!
So, imagine my dismay when I was only three Achievements away from Perfection, only to realize that I was locked out from achieving it!
You see, the three Achievements I was missing all involved dying in silly ways. I’ll give an example with as few spoilers as I can: One of the Achievements I missed out involved dying via a gas explosion caused by lighting a stove at the incorrect setting. However, since I was paying attention, read the warning next to the stove, and, therefore, adjusted it to the “safe” setting before lighting it, the game saved my progress with the stove at the correct setting and I was no longer able to reset it to an unsafe level of operation to get blown up.
I knew not to “fear” death, but I didn’t know Riddlewood Manor actually encouraged death until after I’d already completed it! I never check what Achievements are available in a game – or what needs to be done to unlock them – until after I’ve finished it at least once, for fear of spoilers. So, after completing Riddlewood Manor and discovering I was only three Achievements away from Perfection, I figured it would be easy-peasy to go back into my completed Save file and die three times. Not so. I had to start an entirely new 0% completed run of Riddlewood Manor. It felt like I was being punished for playing well!
To me, the meticulous, detail-oriented nature of the gameplay – along with the fact you have a death counter on your pause/map screen – indicated that you should take the “one way out” only when necessary. After you’d successfully progressed as far as you possibly could, otherwise unscathed. It made sense to me, narratively and as a player, to die as little as possible and strive for perfection wherever possible.
For example, take this puzzle involving bubbles floating out of a bathtub that I failed:
Minor spoiler, but you need to pop the bubbles in the order they floated out of the tub. And you might look at that poor-quality GIF I made of my gameplay and think “Well, isn’t that exactly what you did, Lauren? Why did you fail after two correct bubble pops?!” Good eye and great question! Look closer. My finger slipped and I made an accidental mouse-click on the tub before clicking the bubbles in the correct order. The game counted that click as “click 1” of the three clicks needed to pop bubbles for the puzzle. Further cementing in my mind that every minor action mattered and mistakes were to be avoided! (If you’re an old-school adventure gamer, it flips that switch in your brain seeking the answer to “Is this an ‘anything goes’ LucasArts-style point-and-click adventure or an unforgiving Sierra-style?”).
Because it’s not like each death – chosen or not – doesn’t come with a cost! As with all roguelike games, even though you may have gained knowledge or minor upgrades to your situation, you need to start your journey afresh each time you give into the Void. And, for me, that can be enjoyable in game to a point… But I wasn’t about to turn Riddlewood Manor into Riddlewood SOULS. Not to yuck anyone’s yum, but I don’t get my jollies game-wise from repeatedly failing the same set of actions indefinitely for minimal reward. And I think most point-and-click puzzle adventure gamers will agree with me on that sentiment. I like to do things as correctly as I can the first time around, and move forward!
However, I want to stress that, unless you’re striving to unlock every Achievement in one go, Riddlewood Manor delivers what most point-and-click puzzle adventure gamers are looking for!
After a day or two of pouting, I did go back and start over with a fresh save of Riddlewood Manor and got the last three Achievements I was missing:
It was worth the second playthrough. Even with my “one beef,” I can’t deny that Riddlewood Manor is FUN and one of the best point-and-click puzzle adventures I’ve played in years, particularly in the horror genre!
I Recommend Playing Riddlewood Manor!
Overall, I loved Riddlewood Manor and I was really happy I had the opportunity to play it!
The art style is super cute, but still manages to be foreboding. The story is intriguing. There are multiple endings to unlock. It’s tense at times, but also has a lot of silliness/humor (there’s one mini-game involving gassy ghosts with musical toots that gave me a giggle).
And the jump scares were very effective! There’s an option in the Settings to toggle on a “jump scare alert,” but I didn’t use it. I figured the alarm would jar my nerves as much or more than the actual scares, without the narrative reward of just letting them happen.
For me, the reason the jump scares worked, was because I’d become so intensely hyper-focused on solving a puzzle or trying to remember something I’d seen (again, everything you witness matters, even if it’s not until much, much later… You may want to get a notebook and write symbols you see down as you go, if you want to speedrun Riddlewood Manor), that I’d temporarily forget that I was inside a haunted mansion with dark spirits ready to lurch out at me.
The scare that made me physically leap up out of my seat – twice! – involved a dollhouse. I won’t elaborate beyond that, but they got me GOOD with that one!!
I also appreciated that all of the puzzles were fair. There’s little-to-no random guessing. Every puzzle has a solution. Every code can be deciphered. Maybe not in the moment you discover it, but eventually. You’ll see something in one room, store it in your memory banks, and make use of what you learned many rooms later. You have to PAY ATTENTION to EVERYTHING! As you should in any exorcism-type situation. Horror fans know the dangers of letting your mind wander when demonic entities are involved!
So, if you have the opportunity, I highly recommend buying Riddlewood Manor on Steam! It’s a very fun time, and I can’t wait for Peanut Button to make another horror game in the future! I’m a fan now.
Stay in the light. Take care of your dragon. Don’t fear the end. And have a great time playing Riddlewood Manor… I did!
Images for this review are all screenshots or recordings from my actual playthroughs of Riddlewood Manor, save for the top/featured image which is the title card/logo asset I nabbed from the “Media Press Kit” on Peanut Button’s website.
