Lucy recommends: Curse of Resthaven
The horrors persist, but so does time
Hello folks and welcome to Friday!
This week's pick is the Eldritch investigation roguelite Curse of Resthaven. It's a really exciting genre mashup that features interesting time loop mechanics, a gripping narrative, and yes, The Horrors. If you liked Widow's Bay and The Forgotten City, you will absolutely dig this.
I've also got a great interview with its game director where we talk about the Widow's Bay comparisons, what influenced the team, and why time mechanics are so right for a game like this one. I adored the demo and I can't wait to tell you more about it, so let's jump right in!
In this single-player narrative roguelite, govern a cursed island as you investigate your niece’s mysterious disappearance. Interrogate, trade, upgrade, and embark upon card-based expeditions to uncover dark secrets – before the next cataclysm strikes.
Thanks so much to paid LFG Supporters! This week, they got a bonus newsletter with my MR. RECORDS preview, as all as thoughts on the ongoing Xbox Reset, CONTROL Resonant, and Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave. They also get Discord access and plenty of game code giveaways (we have a very exciting one coming up next week!). To join and support, hit the button below!
What is Curse of Resthaven?
You play as Ambrose, the newly-appointed Governor of the island of Resthaven. The place is desperately run down and so it falls to you to fix up the town and reinstate trading its wares with neighboring nations. But not all is as it seems on the cursed island.
Your niece is missing, and Eldritch horrors lurk in the dark. After six days, the island is destroyed in a cataclysmic event, but somehow you are sent back in time to the day of your arrival, complete with all the knowledge you've accrued along the way, and some boons from a watching presence to help you solve the island's mysteries.
What's the gameplay loop?
🔍 The investigation: Your niece Amalia has gone missing, and you need to follow leads to track her down. Talk to the townsfolk, question their motives, and hopefully get to the bottom of the island's many secrets
⚖️ Trading: Collect wares from the island's businesses and trade them with the visiting merchants at the docks. Build relationships with these merchants and pay close attention to the worldly factors that may impact what they're looking for, and crucially, what they're willing to pay
🏚️ Town management: Invest the money earned from trading back into the town by upgrading its businesses. Doing so then unlocks new items to trade with merchants, which means more money for the town
⚔️ Expeditions: Venture into the wilds surrounding the town to track down your niece, but be warned, the horrors lurk here, so make sure you're prepared for these card-based scenarios. Ask the town Sage for advice on who or what to bring with you
⏰ Time: Undertaking expeditions, trading, and interrogating the townsfolk takes time, and time is not on your side. Choose your actions carefully.
🌀 The loop: Every six days, a cataclysmic event hits the island and destroys it. You are then sent back to the day you first arrived, doomed to live this loop over and over until you solve the mystery of Resthaven. Luckily, a goddess, (or presence or whatever you'd like to call her) has taken a shine to you, and gives you a boon to help on your next run. Unfortunately, the boon is not without its downsides...
Who's making it?
Curse of Resthaven is developed by Hilltop Studios, a Canadian team who released their first game, Lil' Guardsman back in 2024.
Why Curse of Resthaven rules
I've been thinking a lot about time recently. Well, time in video games at least. We often take it for granted because usually that main story quest can and will wait for you to get around to it. Who cares if the Reapers are coming, I've got a date with Garrus on the Citadel first. A few games have been toying with that idea recently by making time a limited resource and I've really been enjoying the push and pull that it gives me as a player. I second guess every quest I undertake in The Blood of Dawnwalker because I want to make sure I leave enough time to save my family. It made me a more efficient investigator in The Séance of Blake Manor because I didn't want to waste a single question. In Star Wars Zero Company, well, it cost the galaxy some heroics.
I really like how Curse of Resthaven plays with time.
Not only do actions take units of time to undertake, but there's a time loop roguelite element that empowers me as I play. So while I'm still feeling the friction of figuring out the best possible way to continue my investigation (do I go on an excursion or spend the time interrogating a potential suspect? Do I trade now, or save it for later when market conditions may have changed in my favor?), I then get to go back to the very beginning, only this time with an advantage. I know the main players, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and I have more leads to chase down than I did before in my hunt for my missing niece. Helpfully, Resthaven also gives you a timeline, so you can keep track of key events that you've uncovered while playing, so you can potentially intervene or be a witness to them.
It reminds me a lot of The Forgotten City. In that game, knowledge and earned items carry over between loops as you try to prevent the Golden Rule from being enacted. In Resthaven, money does not carry over, but any upgrades I've purchased do, so I have a head start in subsequent loops. It's a great quality of life mechanic, and there are others, like Garet, your faithful steward, who you can ask to undertake a quick task for you at the start of a loop so that you don't have to waste time doing it, just like The Forgotten City's trusty Galerius.
It's not just taking knowledge from loop to loop that empowers me, the roguelite elements greatly help too. Resthaven's explanation for this is that there's an entity watching over the island's fate, and she gives you gifts to help as you loop. Unfortunately, these gifts also come at a cost, so while a boon may dramatically help in one element of your investigation, it may make your life much harder in another. It's another tactful way of adding friction, and I love it.
I could go on about the things I love about Curse of Resthaven: its tight writing that doesn't waste a word, the excellent performances and beautiful art, the way it introduces its eldritch horror in bit by glorious bit, but it's the use of time that I'll take away with me.
For fans of
The Forgotten City, Widow's Bay, The Séance of Blake Manor
Try Curse of Resthaven yourself!
The demo is actually getting expanded on October 8th ahead of Steam Next Fest, so make sure you keep it in your library!
From the developer
Huge thanks to game director Scott Christian for the incredibly thoughtful answers to my questions!
LFG: What are the origins of the project, and how many people are working on it?
Scott Christian: Curse of Resthaven wasn’t actually the first idea we had after Lil’ Guardsman. We were really happy with how Lil’ Guardsman launched, and we had this big, pie-in-the-sky idea for something much bigger.
The industry had other plans.
We pitched that bigger game and got a lot of “we really like this, but the industry is on fire and everyone is looking for safer bets.” So the idea for Curse of Resthaven, which had also been floating around my head for a while, suddenly made sense. We thought, ‘okay, this is something we can make smaller.’ The team will laugh to read that.
It is SO MUCH BIGGER and more ambitious than Lil’ Guardsman. Somehow, though, we made it in roughly the same amount of time, with the same lean and mean team size. The funny thing is that I’m actually much more excited about what Curse became than I was about that original, much larger pitch. It really cemented my belief that constraints can foster the best ideas, because you can’t be lazy.
We’re a team of five. Three of us carried over from Lil’ Guardsman, while the artists on this project are new and are perfectly suited to the beautiful, gloomy, disturbing aesthetic we are going for.
I’m the game director, narrative director and composer. Adolfo Rico is our tech director and does all the programming. Matt Bernard is my co-writer and directed the voicecast through all 7,000 lines of dialogue. Our artists are Maddy Woodland, our character artist, and Clayton Nguyen, our art director, environment artist and UI artist. They’re also partners in real life, which is awesome and convenient for them, I’m sure.
The Hilltop team: Matt, Clayton, Scott, Adolfo (floating), and Maddy outside of The Black Pony Café and Snack Bar in Toronto, which serves as inspiration for the in-game Black Pony Tavern!
LFG: Were there any particular stories, games, movies, or books that served as inspiration for Curse of Resthaven?
I came to the table with a few things in mind: 18th-century-inspired gothic/folk horror, a far-flung colony, and the idea of playing as its new governor. But EVERYONE on the team has had a hand in shaping and mutating the world and the lore. We all bring our favourite games, books, movies and other weird obsessions to the DNA of the game. Our art team leans HEAVILY on historical research for clothing and architecture… my impression is that they live in and among stacks of old books.
For me, it was mainly literature that had the biggest influence on the world and tone. I was thinking a lot about the feeling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The romantic/Victorian horror era through to penny dreadfuls, which inspire the game, as well. I really love Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s writing, and Mexican Gothic was a big touchstone when I was imagining the town of Resthaven.
The cleanest answer, and the one I’ve been using since the beginning, is that Curse of Resthaven is what you’d get if Edgar Allan Poe, Twin Peaks and Lost had a baby.
In terms of the game’s mechanics, we were thinking about a certain rhythm/structure core loop from the beginning. Dredge, Cult of the Lamb, Darkest Dungeon and Loop Hero were all part of the early conversations. We riff on that general shape, but instead of combat, we’ve got trading and our weird card-based expedition puzzle system.
LFG: Have you seen Widow’s Bay, and what do you make of it/the commonalities with Curse of Resthaven?
A few months ago, a handful of friends who knew what we were making started making comments about the overlap. Which terrified me. It sounded REALLY close.
I think genre fiction naturally gravitates towards archetypes, so it makes sense that you’d occasionally end up in similar places. But I was definitely a little spooked when I started hearing about Widow’s Bay, so I consciously didn’t look at it until we had finalized all the writing and editing for Curse.
My wife and I finally started watching it a few weeks ago, and I absolutely love it. I’m delighted by it. The mix of horror and humour while still remaining dead serious somehow is a magic trick! And I can see the parallels, but the two things are so different. I shouldn’t have been spooked.
I think the things the two properties have in common are actually what makes both of them so compelling. You get this deep, intimate window into fascinating, three-dimensional characters and the horrifying, but also very human, things that happen to them. But at the same time, there’s a sense that there’s a way more occurring outside the frame that flavours what you see, but you’ll never be shown directly.
LFG: The mystery of what happened to Amalia is obviously central to the game's narrative, but what made you implement the trading/town management/card side to it all? Which mechanics came first and which were thought of later?
The mechanics came out of the narrative (at a very early stage). I grew up on classic adventure games and LOVE the genre, but I also want to find deeper, more immediate and more “clicky” mechanics to complement the investigation. As we got to know Ambrose and the dire state of the colony he’s been dropped in to administer, trading became an obvious tentpole mechanic. Originally, the trading was much closer to a 4X game. It felt like a spreadsheet (not totally in a bad way). There was min-maxing. It was basically a gothic accounting simulator during trading.
But as we developed the game, it became clear that the core of Curse of Resthaven is relationships. That led us to redesign the system into something closer to Potionomics and Recettear: a haggling sim where you leverage market conditions, relationships and trade secrets you’ve uncovered.
LFG: Time mechanics are having something of a moment with The Séance of Blake Manor and The Blood of Dawnwalker. What made you implement time into Curse of Resthaven and as designers, what does it bring to the game? And what was the trickiest part about doing so?
I have receipts that we were working out how time functioned in Resthaven before either of those games launched!
Seriously, though, it’s been cool to see other games taking similar approaches. I think tension and friction are part of what makes games fun, and that’s a big part of why we have the time loop and why key actions cost time. An expedition across the island eats up your day. Bartering with multiple merchant captains costs a couple of hours. You have to make choices about how you spend your limited time.
The tricky part was interrogation. It’s probably the closest thing in Curse to a traditional adventure game, and it felt like a cardinal sin to make asking questions cost time. I didn’t want to discourage players from asking everyone about every weird topic they’ve collected. We wrote a lot of flavourful, lore-rich responses for things players may never even ask. But that’s the gift of the timeloop… you could spend an entire week just questioning and do that deep dive, and then get back to the mission.
But we ultimately wanted real dramatic stakes. Your niece is out there somewhere, and there’s every reason to believe she’s not okay and needs you. If every action is consequence-free, that urgency starts to disappear.
LFG: The writing and cast are really strong from the outset. How did you work to refine the tone of the game and the actors to perform it?
In terms of the writing and tone, we read everything out loud. Like, our first drafts. Matt and I get on a video call and pick a part and hear it. It’s such a basic thing, but I think it’s one of the best things game writers can do: hear your stuff spoken. It’s completely different in the air than it is on the page.
We also had a really good editor on this one who helped us polish the script. Lil’ Guardsman could be a little messier and more chaotic. With Curse, I wanted to get closer to the narrative integrity of the film, TV and literature that inspire it.
Regarding the casting, I came to games from a slightly strange route. My background is as a composer, conductor and musical director, primarily in theatre here in Canada. As a result, most of my friends are actors. The same is true of my co-writer, Matt. So we have this tremendous pool of professional actors to draw from.
I think one of the reasons we get such good VO is that everyone records in the same space, on the same mic. My setup is pretty simple, but the result is that everyone sounds like they’re in the same world sonically. I’m at the computer listening through headphones while Matt is listening in the room, and we direct the performances together. Being in physical space, responding to what the actor is doing, and pushing the performance in the moment. We’ve gotten some really special reads that way.
LFG: And finally, what are your hopes for Curse of Resthaven?
I’m just really excited for people to play it. I should be completely burnt out and sick of it by now, but somehow I still have a blast playtesting it for the bajillionth time. It’s a special one.
I hope we can cut through the noise and find our people. Visibility is a CHALLENGE. There are so many games coming out all the time, and we’re a tiny studio, so I’d love for this beautiful, dark little game to find the people it was made for.
We’re already kicking around ideas for DLC and a hypothetical sequel. I think we’ve built a really great mechanical foundation that we could keep playing with. After Lil’ Guardsman, I wanted to make something completely different, and that’s how Curse happened. But this time, I don’t want to leave it behind.
This mechanical combination is fun and unique; I really like these characters; I love this island and this weird world we’ve cooked up. I hope that launch goes well enough that we can immediately jump into more!
Some good news to end the week
- I mentioned this in this week's bonus newsletter, but it's been fantastic to see the response to Dressmaker! The team recouped their costs in under 24 hours, they're at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, and my social feeds are full of images of incredible designs made by the community. You love to see it!
- CONTROL Resonant launched this week to great reviews and the game topped the Steam bestseller chart. And while cracked copies of the game appeared online, there's also been a sort of movement among pirates to support the studio and actually buy the game. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it, but I love that it's happening. Support the games and studios you like!
I tried something a bit new in this newsletter, let me know how you like the formatting!
Finally, I was on the Triple Click podcast this week, huge thanks to Kirk and Maddy for having me on to talk about LFG, Wolverine, Fire Emblem, and Beck.
Thanks so much for reading, I'll see you next week!