![]() Every round opens with a handful of workers ready to do your bidding. At its baseline, this is a worker placement game. The format for this tale of obsession couldn’t be more appropriate. Try as you might to break free, your entire life has been consumed by an earworm. Its terror lies in the inescapability of the absurd. Somewhere after the villagers bar you from their town but before your hapless scientist willingly sheds the last scraps of their sanity, it sinks in: this is a deeply funny game, and all the more unsettling for it. What begins as the pursuit of your father’s unfinished masterwork becomes a comedy of errors, a sequence of shocks, a procession of boiling blood transfusions, horse stilts, and spousal abandonment. ![]() Where other titles emphasize the horror and gore of Gothic fiction, resulting in a lurid, sickly air - Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein springs to mind - My Father’s Work embraces another brand of horror altogether. My Father’s Work understands that all obsession is foolish. Frankenstein get the idea to stitch together his monster? Did Crawford Tillinghast really have nothing better to do with his resonance engine than to feed his servants to monsters from a parallel dimension? Would you visit an ignominious count’s castle in the Carpathian Mountains? What sticks out most, however, is the game’s acknowledgement that this is all faintly ridiculous. Its success is an amalgam of factors, a congruence of design and illustration and fire-crackle sound effects. I hesitate to declare that any one detail accounts for the pitch-perfect tone of My Father’s Work. You’ve journeyed to these parts to claim your inheritance, but there’s a catch: an unfinished blueprint, scrawled in your father’s half-legible griffonage. The narrators, if you opt to listen rather than read aloud, speak in the ominous tones of an English accent. The locals are superstitious, and why not? Children go missing in these parts. ![]() It never seems to be daytime in this hamlet if there is sunlight it’s the crepuscular sort, filtered over gray mountains and stands of pines. Petty establishes the scene with images and sounds drawn from more than a century’s worth of touchstones. On a hill above an Eastern European hamlet there stands a house, haunted by rumor and perhaps actual shades, where some who enter never emerge and all who do escape its clutch are forever altered. ![]()
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