Wayward Manor has quite an interesting concept and premise. It is a game that tasks you, as the ghost of an old manor, with getting rid of the manor’s annoying living inhabitants by figuring out ways to scare them. In order to achieve this, you will need to use your ghostly powers of pressing the left mouse button to manipulate set items around the levels. In its most simplistic moments, this may be just dropping a bottle on someone’s head; but in its more creative moments, you may need to position items around the room to create a combination or chain reaction, attract the attention of the person by shaking a statue or smashing a bottle, or even time your interactions based on the person’s movement patterns.
The levels and their puzzles are themed around the particular person or people that you are trying to scare. The hunter has animal trophies that can be burned by tricking him to fire an arrow through a candle in the direction of said trophy; the mother, who is obsessed with clothes, can be distressed by finding ways to dirty her collection; you can get the dad drunk, so he embarrasses himself by dancing to music; and so forth.
For you to successfully spook an inhabitant, you need to scare them six times, before unleashing a final fright which sends them screaming out the door. The puzzles themselves are not particularly linear, as there are a fair number of items and combinations littered around for you to play with; in addition to secret scares, which are essentially challenges – combinations that are more complex, or even just unexpected or humorous (for example, you can get the hunter to shoot his butler).
As I already intimated, I find the ideas that the game presents to be intriguing; but unfortunately in practice, the gameplay is vapid and the concept poorly realised. While it may sound like the variety of themed puzzles gives the game some complexity and variation, it really doesn’t. The game is highly simplistic and surprisingly easy. In some of the later levels, I managed to over think some of the puzzles, trying to find combinations or different ways that I could use items, when in actual fact all I needed to do was hit the person on the head with a bottle…again.
In a few instances, I was even able to repeat the exact same puzzle solution multiple times in order to get two or three of the required scares. And while I give credit to the game for varying the themes by the individuals you are scaring, you will encounter them multiple times throughout the game, and their puzzles essentially remain the same – it was fun dirtying the mother’s clothes, but it quickly lost its charm after I had repeated the same thing multiple times throughout every level that involved her.
While I did enjoy, and find some satisfaction in combining and manipulating items to form more indirect scares, these suffer much the same problem as everything else, in that they are repetitive and ultimately uninspired. The various methods of producing a scare are initially fun and exciting, but there is not enough evolution in terms of creativity or challenge.
Additionally, the game has a decidedly low budget feel. The options are sparse, the graphics are terrible, it took me only just over 2 hours to complete, and the User Interface is sloppy – little imperfections like your mouse cursor disappearing underneath text boxes, and even character dialogue being obscured or difficult to read. The sound effects and the music occasionally overlap, the animations of the characters are repetitive, and there was the occasional bug that forced me to restart the level.
It’s a damn shame, because there are certainly some good ideas here; and for all its seemingly cheap presentation, I did quite like the aesthetic. The characters are exaggerated to the point of caricature, the manor manages to create a partially spooky air, and the music and sound effects, while badly placed in some instances, are kind of fun and silly – the soundtrack is highly limited, but it certainly isn’t bad. Also, the narrative is decent albeit simple, and the cut-scenes’ narrations are actually pretty good; the voice actor does a very good job.
However, the flaws are too glaring. Wayward Manor, despite offering some cheap thrills, is irrefutably unpolished and lacks the variation, complexity and challenge that could have made this game a genuine treat.