Paper Cut Mansion

Description

In this papercraft roguelite, explore a mysterious mansion floor by floor. 

Solve puzzles, battle enemies and complete quests as you unlock new abilities to aid you on each run as you solve the mystery behind the Paper Cut Mansion.

Paper Cut Mansion is a top-down RPG, exploration type of game, whereas the title of the game suggests, everything is paper cut.

Developed by Space Lizard Studios, and published by Thunderful Publishing, they have delivered a pretty unique type of game, keep reading to find out why!

Explore the vast amounts of floors and uncover the mystery behind the Mansion, solve the puzzles on each floor, level up and gain skill points, although there is only one skill point that is even worth it, which will be mentioned as you read through it.

Conquer each section as you unravel the clues, and search the furniture for anything that can be found.

Gameplay

Have you wondered what it would be like if your cardboard or paper cutouts ever came to life? Well now you can in Paper Cut Mansion, and as the name suggests, as previously stated, everything and I mean everything is paper cut! From the enemies to the equipment and characters.

We begin this journey following an uneven treacherous cut-out of a path, in the dead of night with owls and squirrels watching your every move, and goodness knows what else could be lurking. You arrive at some massive gates, you open them and you are now sucked into the mansion and thus beginning the game, the luring of the music and the nicely orchestrated sounds that you listen to trap you in a room with a depressed skeleton.

You can play this game in any of the 3 portals, which translates to different dimensions, though I would suggest staying in the Neo-Cortex, just be wary of a ghost that can potentially hunt and kill you, but will disappear after a while.

I would also highly recommend that you play on a controller for general moving, rotation and attacking, as the keyboard and mouse combo aren't very well... reliable for me at least, and that's saying something coming from a person who mains the keyboard and mouse combo. But when it comes to solving the puzzles along the way, I would suggest using the mouse as the controller seems to act a bit wonky at times.

Speaking of wonkiness, the graphics are much to be desired but what can you expect when the name visually states "Paper Cut"? Even on the highest settings available, the game looks rather unique, and it really shows up as something different and not touched upon before, though not my type of game design, it makes up for its unique designs, including enemies, characters and general aesthetics.

So we touched upon the graphics let's talk about the sounds. Paper Cut Mansion's best quality to me lies in its music, from the moment you are sucked into the Mansion in the beginning, you can tell it'll have some nice tunes and its unique play on the lyrics. Different songs can be heard as you progress through each floor, as it tells the tale of the adventurer's life, as if he was in a coma or something, at least for me, the music was amazing, the other effects were generally good, but not overbearing.

We spoke about the general design, but how about the missions or general floor levels? Each floor isn't the same, but the overall feel of each floor is the same, you do the side missions, you get a skill point, which I recommend putting some into the brain category since there are chests which require you to have a certain amount of brain juice, you search the surrounding area for clues, evidence and coins, which can be used to purchase "medicine" or "equipment" from their respective vendors, solve the puzzles and complete.

To me, it felt rather dull and repetitive, rinse and repeat, shoot some enemies and find some stuff... Not my idea of fun, but who am I to judge?

Be careful how you proceed with each level, one wrong move and you will die permanently, and will have to restart from Floor 1 again! At least you get to keep the equipment cards that you find.

A fair warning to all who are willing to play, watch out for the ghost as it hunts you... They hurt a lot.

Final thoughts

Finally, I'd like to say that while the game is overall different and unique in its own right, feels more like an acquired taste for this top-down adventure-style type of game

And to the best of my knowledge, there aren't many games like this unless you count It Takes Two as one of those types of games, then sure.

Even still, it's a fair shout from me for the music and lyrics that are present here, I enjoyed those the most, I really did.

Keep on the lookout, as there are rumours of the game coming out for the Nintendo Switch! I'm sure that will be exciting news for the Nintendo fans out there!

Available on -

Steam - Epic Games - GOG.com - Xbox

£16.99/$19.99/19,99€

If you would like to follow and support the developer and follow the news you can find it here - Paper Cut Mansion

(Prices are the same for Each of their respective stores)