Highlands, Deep Waters Demo

Being a detective is stressful enough in the real world, where you do not have to deal with monsters or supernatural events, so it’s that much more challenging in a virtual environment or a fantasy story. However, gamers like to deal with the paranormal, especially when the stories are told right and the concepts are not too ludicrous as to ruin the atmosphere.

Highlands, Deep Waters is a text-based adventure game in which you play the role of an investigator as he tries to conduct a case regarding a murder in a small town in Scotland. However, things take a turn for the worse once he starts to uncover a lot of dark secrets, some of which involve cultists and many other horrors that are not even from this world.

The game is about as straightforward as it gets for the text-based genre, because all you have to do is read the text on the screen and make choices in order to decide what your character should do. You can even customize the said character by choosing the gender and a few other things, and most of these choices affect how he or she is perceived by other characters throughout the story.

Since you are a detective, it’s important to analyze the clues you stumble upon, but most of the time the decisions regarding how to proceed are left up to you. Whether you want to keep yourself as distanced as possible from the cultist and the abyssal horrors that lurk beneath the town or not, you are free to choose whatever route suits you the most. Naturally, the best thing about this is that you can go back and change everything in your second or third playthrough.

You can keep track of the case in the notes section, even if these are added automatically as you uncover new information. It helps to be able to review your evidence, on the other hand, otherwise it would be pretty difficult to remember all the details by the end. The fact that there are no graphics should not come as a surprise either to the fans of the genre, but it may turn away new players, unfortunately.

Highlands, Deep Waters feels a lot like a Lovecraft novel, which is not a bad thing at all. It may need some polishing in the writing department, but the experience as a whole is pretty engaging and fun