Paper cut mansion is a new roguelike, exploration, puzzler from Cambridge based developers Space Lizard Studios. It's published by Thunderful on both PC and Xbox.
Paper cut mansion sees you playing the part of a young detective called Toby, who, finding himself mysteriously now made out of cardboard, has to explore a creepy mansion to piece together what exactly is going on.
Paper cut mansion is a game a desperately want to like, it's premise and artistic approach immediately ingratiated it to me.
However it's poor execution ends up making it a very hard pass.
Literally everything except the "premise and artistic approach" is bad.
Immediately the controls feel awful, I mean right from the menu screen.
The mouse feels sluggish and has enormous input lag. Even with adjusting this in the options it's completely unplayable with M&K.
Controller thankfully responds much better, but once you start exploring the mansion the frame pacing seems uncomfortably "off". There's a nauseating but subtle jutter to everything and some peculiar fps drops, that just turn a beautiful looking game into an emetic mess.
The gameplay itself seems ok, puzzles are fairly simple and the room to room exploration pleasantly reminded me of a more sedate "Attic Attack" (from way back before you were born) mixed in with a dash of psychonauts.
Stability was the next game killer to raise it's head.
I was initially unable to review the game as I was traveling and had hoped to check it out on Steam Deck, but no... The game would load up, then freeze and crash. I tried all the usual SD fixes but nothing was working. Now that's fair enough, anyone who has a SD knows they are pretty fickle and I couldn't hold that against the game.
However after installing on a desktop PC I continued to have intermittent crashes, black screen and performance issues.
All things considered I'd recommend avoiding this one.
You can download a free demo on Steam if you want to check it out for yourself.
It also might be worth keeping an eye on their steam page for any patches and updates that might address these negatives in the future.
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