My conclusion after playing the early-access demo for the cosmic-horror card-crafting game The Horror at Highrook was “I want to see more.” Well, now that it’s fully out, I’ve seen more.

The character advancement, for instance, is more card crafting. There’s a textbook card you can use in the School to give a character +1 level… but no character has the “Lessons” skill that the School uses, so you have to collect a couple of bonus cards by defeating monsters. It’s basically combat XP, tweaked to fit the rest of the game’s interface.

Oh, yeah, this game has monsters, and they can be a nuisance. Not much of a nuisance, though. They might take slivers or bigger chunks out of the health or sanity of any character that stays in the room with them for an in-game hour, and defeating them is yet another card-crafting task that a character has to stay in the room for a couple of hours to accomplish; if you’re good at keeping the characters busy, though, you’ll usually have some restorattives on hand already. If you don’t, you will soon enough – farming up an ingredient and refining it into usability are two more two-hour tasks.

(I never did see what happened to fully incapacitated or insane characters…)

The one caveat to this lack of “combat” difficulty is that one character has an unmarked side quest about going cold turkey from alcohol, and moonshine happens to be the only thing in the game that restores sanity. So that character just had to avoid the sanity-damaging challenges, and everything was fine.

(The UI includes a set of survival meters for each character along the top edge of the screen now, which was a definite improvement over the early-access version, in which I had to click on a character’s card to see whetther they’d been unsettled a little bit by that child ghost…)

The other side quests were yet more card crafting, something for one character to work on while the others were farming bonus cards and advancing toward the next chapter-ending ritual.

Overall, I’d classify The Horror at Highrook as a dark cozy game. I beat it in about 11 hours, doing all the side quests and getting 12 out of 13 achievements, and the closest I came to being challenged was the time I didn’t realize I could use the “field phone” card more than once and flailed around trying to get to the end of that chapter without it.

But there’s a control in the corner of the screen that lets players speed up in-game time and get to the end faster, and during most of those 11 hours, I wasn’t tempted to touch it. I wanted to savor the atmosphere for as long as it lasted. And unlike some other games that rely heavily on ambience, the gameplay and writing were at least good enough to not kick me out of the mood.

Recommended.