Riddlewood Manor is a point-and-click game developed and published by Peanut Button Studio. The game will be available on Steam starting October 22, 2025. Its horror comedy theme, complete with a possessed doll, makes it the ideal choice for the Halloween season.
Riddlewood Manor: an escape room in a haunted home
In Riddlewood Manor, we are called upon to investigate the mysteries surrounding the Riddlewood family estate. The aim is to piece together what happened to the family and, in some ways, to try to give the story a happy ending.
As we investigate, we will discover the family’s history, what happened to Emily, and what role her demonic doll Suzie plays in all this.
Riddlewood Manor is a point-and-click game in which we go around collecting items and solving puzzles and mini-games. Each puzzle and mini-game is different. What makes this game unique is that it combines the classic point-and-click mechanics with those of an escape room.
Riddlewood Manor has many rooms and secret areas to explore. However, instead of being freely explorable, as is usually the case in point-and-click games, each room must be solved individually.
Each room has puzzles that allow us to collect useful items, advance the plot, or progress in the game. However, progress is not completely linear. Sometimes, part of a puzzle is related to the room, while other puzzles allow us to unlock the next room. Depending on the path we decide to take or if we don’t have enough items to continue, we will often find ourselves solving the same puzzles more than once.
The game is punitive in that if we interact with the wrong element, we die and have to repeat the room. Dying is also our “way out” when we realize that we lack the necessary elements to continue.
Riddlewood Manor requires us to repeatedly go back and forth between rooms to collect all the necessary items and examine clues.
For example, to solve the puzzle in Emily’s room, you must go back and record the clues you found in the other rooms.
Despite some clunky elements and forced backtracking, the puzzles are well-designed. The puzzles we face have different mechanics. Some are classic brain teasers, like the Tower of Hanoi or memory games. Each one has been revisited and made much spookier.
The only thing we didn’t like was having to redo part of a puzzle when you had to return to the room for one reason or another and hadn’t finished it.
On the other hand, we appreciated that the puzzles were varied and required a lot of thinking. We also liked that, as in old-school point-and-click games, you need pen and paper to write down clues.
The difficulty is increased by distracting elements because some clues cannot be used immediately and can initially lead us off track. However, it is very satisfying in the end to reconstruct the interconnected puzzles, which only together lead to the solution of the room.
Intriguing puzzles
Riddlewood Manor offers puzzles that are sometimes cryptic but well-designed and satisfying to solve. Unfortunately, it requires a bit of backtracking that could have been avoided.
The atmosphere is creepy yet lighthearted, balancing horror and comedy. There are jump scares, and although you can’t remove them completely, you can activate a warning.
The developers chose not to include an in-game hint system. This gives the game a very old-school feel. In general, we are always in favor of in-game hints—when they are not too invasive—because, for various reasons, it can happen that we fail to see the solution even when it is right in front of our eyes.
We got stuck on some of the puzzles for a while. For instance, we knew what to do but couldn’t find the exact spot to interact with objects that we knew had to be combined. A help system would have been useful in these cases to save us time.
The game is very engaging. One puzzle leads to another, leaving you eager to find out what awaits you next and how the various clues you’ve collected fit together.
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