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The Shadow Over Chapelwaite...

Hello, and welcome to Chapelwaite!
After many long fantasy epic adventures I decided to play a short horror game. I think it took me one hour to finish this game that is called Chapelwaite. Made by Sidewinder for the Theme Roulette event of July 2018, this game is inspired by Stephen King's tale Jerusalem's Lot (and now it's also a tv series) and the Cthulhu Mythos (as you can probably guess from the title of this review!).

In this game we play as Charles Boone, that inherits a house, Chapelwaite, from a recently deceased relative. He moves there with his trusted manservant Calvin, but tensione discover that the place is considered a "bad house" by the local residents: they say that the place is haunted, and soon it becomes clear that witchcraft and monstrous creatures are involved.

More or less this happens in the novel too, bit luckily here things will be a little different. Chapelwaite is a game of exploration, not without some action scenes, chases and combat.


Don't worry that creature isn't real. Or is it?


I like a lot the graphic resources (sprites and facesets) used because these fits perfectly the serious mood and dark setting of the game. Characters and monsters are appropriated for an horror game set in the 1850 (like the short story), and also music is really on point and atmospheric.
Mapping is ok, it's not bad, but I think that given more time to the developer to make this game would have enhanced the setting, that feels a bit "empty", anyway maps are still decent and well arranged despite some little imprecisions like bookcases in front of the windows or other little mistakes.

The gameplay is what I expected: Charles Boone will explore Chapelwaite and the surroundings, alone of with his servant, to look for items (like book and keys, but he can also find weapons and healing items), clues and people he has to talk to. Game is automatically saved when Boone writes a letter to his friend or studies a book, before going to bed.
So yes, basically the game is saved once every day, the characters also earn a level after each sleep (besides the levels earned with combat experience, but there are few combat encounters).


I'm sorry smelly friend, but I exist to ruin your plans!


I weote that Charles can study a book: your character can in fact learn some spells that are useful against supernatural beings, but this to the detriment of his sanity. It's your choice, you are warned!

Anyway later (after some shocking experiences) Charles' sanity will be affected and our protagonist will experience visione and hear sudden noises or laughters, random words and names will appear on the screen (these are the words of the Theme Roulette event, amd the names are those of the devs of this very site!) and you will experience some other random nuisance like zooms, inversion of the movement commands and pixelated graphics! That's crazy!

Against the more mundane menaces our friend Charles Boone can use various weapons, I counted six of them, three melee and three firearms, but I am not sure that I found them all. Charles has a special attack depending if he has a melee or ranged weapon, Calvin can wield just his trusted shotgun (and be sure to take and equip it, or he'll be useless during a fight!), but has a skill useful to protect his boss. You cannot use healing items during combat, and you won't heal after sleeping, but do not worry, I found difficulty medium to low, so it will be rather easy to finish the game.


Charles and Calvin confront a group of uncouth thugs! Yes, supernatural monsters aren't the only danger!


Unfortunately the game has also some bugs or errors that aren't due to the protagonist's lack of sanity and in some cases can make the game harder: besides some typos and cut dialogue lines (a problem that can surely be overlooked), but the worst issues I had with this game were the random disappearing sprites and freezes that forced me to exit and reload the game a couple of times! Luckily it is short but I had to replay some days from the beginning. Sigh...

Another thing I saw irrelevant was the days lenght selection: while this works in the sense that you technically can make the game harder by making the days shorter, there are some parts of the game in which you have no time limit at all to explore and visit the various parts of the house, so the selection is quite useless, I think. I don't mind of course, but I noticed this "infinite time" sections.

Final Verdict
Despite some errors and problems that were rather random, so I am not sure that others player will encounter them (other people I know did not have any issue so I won't judge that severely, anyway mind that these freezes may happen!).
In any case this is a nice short horror story and a rather easy game of exploration with a great atmosphere. Combat isn't difficult and dureing the rare istances in which you have to run away from an unbeatable opponent the bad AI of the enemies will help you (I'm positive that I won't retry these sections mor than once!).
It won't get a 4 but comes close with a 3.5/5 in my opinion.