Three little adventures in one? The Charnel House Trilogy is a slice of slow building anxiety now out for point-and-clickers who like their usual noodle-scratching solving puzzles accompanied by some creepy foreboding.
Indie developer Owl Cave would like us to take a trip to Augur Peak, and all you need to do is experience three small chapters and take a ride on a less-than-usual train out of a station in the middle of nowhere.
The indie adventure really is quite a short affair with just a couple of hours’ worth to its name, and that’s if you plod along. It’s not really the length of Charnel House Trilogy you need be concerned about but how much the game is lying to you, and how much it makes you question.
Inhale, Sepulchre and Exhale are the three chapters, with the middle having released for free a while back and now in trilogy form. I won’t talk plot because that’d ruin the creepiness of it all, but I can say it seems to be battling with what seems real and what isn’t - leaving us a casualty.
Puzzles are actually straight forward and don’t require much, but there’s still going to be a fair amount of clicking everything to see what round peg fits what various shaped holes you find to get through them. The voice acting varies through the chapters given how it was all recorded and put together. Also it can really feel ‘just being read’ at times, and a bit heavy.
The pixel art style is a love letter to yesteryear at the expense of our fancy, higher resolution screens today - they do not get along well. The Charnel House Trilogy is available to purchase now with 20% still of through Steam, bringing it to £3.83. If you’re into dark atmospheric mystery head trips then it’s probably worth it, but a full point-and-click romp this is not.
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