The Inheritance of Crimson Manor is a delightfully dreadful puzzle box

Every few years, I get in the mood to solve increasingly intricate puzzle boxes and wander a mansion, unlocking it room by room. Typically, I’ll download all of The Room games and lose a few hours managing an inventory, pixel-peeping for secret messages, and solving increasingly complex puzzles. I loved my first brush with Myst, and The Room fits a similar niche, albeit with more modern graphics, new methods of interacting with the world, and fewer esoteric puzzles that require you spending half an hour solving a riddle in your notebook.

That mood to decipher some puzzles struck again and I recently found myself booting up MediaCity Games’ The Inheritance of Crimson Manor, a puzzle adventure game set in a Victorian mansion. I’m so glad I started my puzzle house dalliance here.

In The Inheritance or Crimson Manor, you play as the longtime assistant to Hadley Strange, a wealthy railroad magnate who, with his family, dies suddenly and mysteriously in a boating accident. Named the executor of his will, you arrive in his palatial home and find an enigmatic letter with some odd instructions. What follows is a few hours long adventure of solving Resident Evil style puzzles in a beautifully rendered, but spooky Victorian home. As you play, you’ll discover not all is as it seems with your employer in a story inspired by Penny Dreadfuls.

I mention the The Room games because The Inheritance of Crimson Manor feels in the same lineage, down to the monocle that can see hidden messages. There’s a foreboding to wandering the locked hallways of an empty Victorian home, especially when you discover the rooms of the children. I don’t know what it is, but something about Victorian children’s toys and lace-lined bed canopies is inherently creepy. The allusions to experiments and asylum admissions don’t help.

The game’s puzzles aren’t terribly complicated, but manage to take just enough time to solve before you get frustrated. Perhaps the bigger puzzle is finding your way to the right room to solve the right puzzle. I was rarely stumped by what to do—and the in-game journal that jots down relevant clues is a massive help—but remembering there are two doors to be unlocked with one key was a challenge. Some of that frustration could be solved with a map akin to modern day Resident Evil games, but I found myself relying on the “dynamic” hint system.

I’m not above using a hint system; I’m a parent with an hour or so of gaming time a night, so banging my head against a Myst-style riddle, SAT logical problem, or a DaVinci Code level puzzle doesn’t bring the joy it used to. I’ll often do my best, enjoy a few minutes of friction and, when I’ve truly exhausted what I think I can do, I’ll search online for a hint or, in Crimson Manor, click the right stick. Or was it the left? One shows you a hint, the other an objective, but, if you’re like me, you’ll end up clicking one when you meant the other. Alas.

The hint system is fine, though Crimson Manor would’ve been served better by The Rise of the Golden Idol’s three step hint system instead. Oftentimes, the “hints” are less hints and more directions: “The crown key opens the East Wing door.” Is that a hint? I mean not really, but after I had used the key once already, it was a useful reminder. Luckily, once you use an item completely, it’ll disappear from your inventory, but I found myself relying on the hint system less for puzzle hints and more for navigation reminders: I know how to solve the puzzle, I just don’t remember where it was.

That said, the puzzles are relatively simple, but fun to solve. You’ll collect keys, solve physical puzzles, logical puzzles, and input information into locks to find more clues to do it all over again. There’s nothing foundational here, but the puzzle design is solid and varied enough to be pretty fun. I was rarely stumped—I’d miss an item or didn’t see a note I needed to read—and the game felt like it respected my time.

You can’t talk about a puzzle adventure game like this without invoking Myst and, while the puzzle design of Crimson Manor isn’t as complex or convoluted as Myst (a good thing), I do find the story to be as compelling. Hadley Strange is no Atrus and the mystery doesn’t revolve around traveling to new worlds in books, but there is something sinister going on here and the game leaves plenty of clues in desk drawers and book shelves for you to put the pieces together. Without spoiling anything, there’s even a narrative choice you can make, which I found to be an unnecessary, but fun decision.

We’re living in a bit of a renaissance of puzzle games, whether it’s The Room, the Golden Idol games, or Lorelei and the Laser Eyes pushing the genre forward, or remakes of the foundational texts like Riven. But, for all the games coming out, it’s still incredibly difficult to nail a satisfying puzzle adventure—people still want Riven for a reason—and The Inheritance of Crimson Manor hits those highs. Like the penny dreadful stories it’s emulating, The Inheritance of Crimson Manor is neither high art nor a AAA premium product, but it’s spooky fun time that I highly recommend checking out.