[ This review will contain spoilers ]

CURSE OF RESTHAVEN DOES NOT KNOW WHEN TO STOP

Hilltop Studio's second game is set in a world like our own in the 18th/19th century, a world of empires and war, of trade and exploration, where the corners of the map are not yet quite filled in, where there are still mysteries in the dark. Into this world, you are dropped as Ambrose, a young politician and new governor of the Resthaven, an island colony on the edge of empire.

As governor you are tasked with restoring this failing colony, building its wealth through trade and investment with ships that dock at its shores. Sell the island's meagre produce, negotiate for higher profits, invest profits in producing new goods, repeat. Each nation's trader has their own preferences and will sometimes request specific goods that they will pay a premium for. Simple enough and a rewarding loop. For a while.

You duties also encompass investigating disappearances and deaths in Resthaven. A young girl who was obsessed with a handsome local boy has disappeared, and an old man kills himself in unusual circumstances. Ask the many named and voiced people around town what they now about these events and perhaps you'll learn something. So long as you ask the right people at the right time. Still, it's intriguing enough and you can make efficiencies by using good judgement in who you ask what.

Then there is the reason you have come to Resthaven at all. The governorship is a means to an end. Your adult niece, Amalia, who came to the island months ago, has gone missing. Why? What was she doing? Who did she spend time with? So you ask around, which requires you to earn the truth of the locals or find information to force them to say what they know. And on top of that, you have to explore the island (spending trade resources and time to play short, illustrated visual-novel story segments).

So that is a lot to juggle! And, thankfully, the gameplay modes interleave with one another. Trading goods produces money to invest in merchants, merchants produce more goods for trade and exploration. Invested merchants are a good source of information, and exploring the island is essential to progress the missing-niece investigation by discovering the camps and letters she has left across town.


THE DAY-TO-DATE FUN

And this is enjoyable! Resthaven, the game and the island, is an enthralling place to be. Every location and item and character are hand-drawn with beautiful and somewhat melancholy art so evocative of a place and people that you could almost imagine the smell of salt spray, the produce at market, and the pipe-weed stuffed under Madam Renee's voluminous hat.

Everything is accompanied with appropriate sound-effects and a varied soundtrack that even after 20 hours was enjoyable to hear. The tavern's bard deserves special mention, with four (and a half) real bangers that I was happy to sit back and just absorb. They each added a tonne to the mood and were clearly specifically made for Resthaven, most referencing recent history and events.

The game's many named characters are all fully voice-acted and for the most part they are performed very well, full of character and personality, delivering nuance and drama without being excessive. Unfortunately my one complaint in this area is with Ambrose, the player character. It seems his VA has been directed to be largely emotionless and detached in his delivery, and even in what should be the most emotional scenes he is sitting at a 4 when I would expect at least a 7 in terms of intensity.

The investigations ARE interesting. Working out how and why people have disappeared and what everyone's motivations are through conversation is intriguing, though there are no opportunities for traditional item-based puzzle-solving. Sometimes a character may ask you to deliver them a trade good, but this is not trying to be anything like a regular point-n-click.

The visual-novel 'expeditions' are pretty cool and varied, most requiring a trade good or recruitable hireling to succeed at. They are usually spooky as heck, emphasising the strangeness of Resthaven and its world. But mystery only works once, which will soon become a problem.


ONE DAY AFTER ANOTHER AFTER ANOTHER AFTER ANOTHER

So imagine. You have been playing Curse of Resthaven for a few hours now, and you think you've got a handle on things. Investments are providing returns, you are learning the island and its inhabitants, you are sure you will eventually find out what happened to Amalia. You might have missed an opportunity for a conversation but it's probably not the end of the world.

Oh. Wait. It's the end of the world.

The town is obliterated in an apocalyptic nightmare. Everyone dies screaming in fire and madness. And Ambrose is pulled out of space and time by a nameless Goddess and dumped right back at the docks at dawn of the first day again. You're right back at the beginning of the game.

Okay. That's not too unexpected, you probably read the game's description and were expecting this. And now you probably know what you need to do. You send your valet off to effectively auto-complete some puzzles you already worked out how to complete. You have a reminder in your journal that you need to talk to X person at Y day and time, so do that. The merchants and traders keep their progress, so you have access to trade goods and higher profits from the start. And the story progress and eventually... it reaches a climax. Hurray, well done, roll cred-

Hold on, what's happening?


THE END IS NOT THE END

Curse of Resthaven does not have merely one timeloop, it has two. Like a New Game+ or a Prestige system, the goddess rips you out of your ending and tells you to do it again. There is another version of this story, another twist, another villain, another ending. Most (though not all) of your progress is reset and you must play the story again, waiting and hoping for any changes. Mercifully, Ambrose does somehow remember a few details of the first 'timeline' and so can skip some of the legwork but there are still multiple hours ahead of repeating the same actions. Trade, make profit, invest in the merchants, investigate Amalia's disappearance and other deaths. Maybe this time the preacher is more suspicious, or this time you have to talk to the General's wife instead of getting the lab assistant dunk, but every time the climax occurs like a Mad-Libs variation on the original and it just CANNOT hit as hard as the first time.

By hour 20 of a 12 hour game, when I have rebuilt the town three times now, made almost the same investigations three times, and I don't know how long it's been since I experienced a fresh Expedition, I am just tired. Clicking through the same dialogues on auto-pilot, just wanting to get through to whatever True Ending awaits. Sometimes the UI will highlight new material with golden upside-down or purple text. Sometimes it won't and I'll only notice the change when it gives me a slightly different quest objective.

Yes, the final story beat relying upon the repeating timeloops and alternate timelines is sort of compelling. In a film they could have had a Groundhog-Day-esque montage of all the different ways the story twisted, but in a video game I had to spend hours doing more or less the whole thing over and over and my payoff was not so much catharsis as relief that it was finally over and I could write this review.

And Ambrose still hardly cared. He did not even sound exhausted or scared or desperate, he just... read the lines.


IT'S OVER... IT'S DONE

Curse of Resthaven is a really good 10-12 hour game that does not know when to stop. It outlived its welcome, but it started off so strongly that it's still worth playing. It's worth the price of entry just to meet the cast of characters and explore the island's strange events. Perhaps you'll discover something I missed.

TLDR: I think this a great mystery game that with very fun time mechanics. It took me about 12 hours to get the first ending, and another 10 hours to beat it twice more for the true ending. The story + artwork + voice acting are great, and carry the game. The gameplay loop grows a little stale. I would still recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a mystery story game.

The voice acting is fantastic, and I don't think I would've gone 22 hours if there wasn't voice acting. I love games where you incrementally know more about what people are doing on certain days, and this has some good moments like that.

Each character felt very unique. I was very invested in how they all tangled together, and learning some clue just for it to be too late in this run kept me invested enough to say "ok, this run, I'm going to try and solve this part".

I really enjoyed walking around the town, occasionally running into someone in an unexpected place gave me both the feeling that these people are going about their business and that they might be up to something.

I really like a timeloop game that allows you to send someone off to solve the puzzles you've already solved, it feels like the game isn't fully reset, but also giving a reason why you don't have to solve them again.

The meta progression definitely helped alleviate how little you get to do on loop 1, when I saw I could ask people a 4th question, I breathed a sigh of relief and got ready to kick up the mystery.

The unique expeditions are fantastic, the art is great, the storytelling is very fun. I must've seen about 50+ expeditions, a handful of them were repeats, but there were a good number that I feel like I saw once and never saw again.

I really enjoyed seeing the town get brighter and the shops grow more plentiful as they upgraded. I felt attached to the shopkeepers because most of them also had plot lines interwoven with them.

Playing on controller had some rough edges; the cursor gets caught in some menus, selecting who you want to talk to can be a little finicky.

I played on release and found my share of bugs that were either avoidable or fixed on restart, but I hope are fixed in patches.

I think there are many places I look and wish there was more depth; the other endings, the trading minigame felt repetitive after our 3rd loop of ending 1, I had no need to trade after upgrading every shop, the pro/con cards for each run lacked enough unique modifiers (I was hoping each run would feel substantially different).

There's a lot of meta progression around expeditions and trading, which was unfortunate as I found that to be the weakest part of the game. The writing for the expeditions was great, and figuring out what you needed was fun enough, but at a certain point, the meta progression makes it so you don't have to interact with the systems of the game. You can find tokens to reveal info about what you need to bring on expeditions, and a late meta perk just basically reveals everything, making the tokens worthless. I would've loved to see the perk just give you tokens, essentially reinforce the pre-existing systems as opposed to side stepping them.

I would have loved to see more perks around talking to people, as I found that to be the most compelling part of the game. I recognize what I'm about to ask would take so much work, but a perk which let you read someone's mind once per loop would be interesting (maybe its just the normal conversion but you don't waste time for 1 question), or a perk that showed you who to talk to for quest progression, or a perk to show where someone is.


I really enjoyed playing this game, and although I could pick apart any number of things, I would still recommend this to almost anyone. The story and the characters really pull you along. I don't finish many games, but I'm really glad I was able to see everything this game had to offer.

i got hooked, hard, then i figured out how stuff worked, and got hooked, hard, then i began to understand the mysteries, so i got hooked, hard.