I played like 60 hours of this game over about 10 days, including staying up until 2am FAR more nights in a row than I should be doing at my age. The game has ZERO tutorial. You're just dropped in and the first time I tried to play I literally gave up after 5 minutes because I couldn't figure out how to do the very first action to unlock any of the areas. But after I looked it up and stumbled around a bit, I ended up realizing there's not really such a thing as a "spoiler" where this game is concerned. It's all just more information and 90% of the things you can read on the wiki are TECHNICALLY contained in the game, just in such a way that it's almost impossible to process or remember. Anyway, 60 hours and COUNTLESS wiki pages later, I've compared the gameplay to several things. The necessity (and in some cases kind of delightful density) of metacontent from the wiki is very similar to Stardew Valley. The way I can sort of enjoyably spend hours just rearranging furniture and items is almost like the Sims, only there's no rouge sims running around setting fires trying to cook. And the gameplay itself, the actual crafting and unlocking and leveling up, is an almost endlessly complex puzzle that I imagine to be halfway between Myst and Civ (I've not technically played either of them but have watched gameplay).
That said... at about midnight last night, 65 hours into the game with So Many wiki pages open, it suddenly struck me that the mechanic specifically for leveling up your action cards (9 components that make up a soul) is still SO CRUELLY COMPLICATED that the handful of times I managed to do it so far has been with more than a bit of luck and prayer.
TLDR: It's a Benoit Blanc situation. Doesn't make sense. Compels me tho. Maybe it will compel you too.

I love Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours quite a bit on their technical and design merits; a blend of idle game and adventure game, where you build up your abilities through "time spend" choices. I think this one is better than Cultist Sim in many respects too.

Unfortunately they are almost always too finicky on either side. The fiction is so overwritten and florid in the precise way which is fun in doses but lacks the direct punch you want for continued exposure. There's also almost no incentive to read all this fiction floating by, because you have to be juggling ten things and also thinking four steps ahead. Who has time to read this shit?

So you're left with the raw idle / crafter treadmill, where you optimize your resources so you can move on to greener pastures. This game is better in some ways on that front, in that items are actually unique and interesting things you see in the world and interact with. But it's often annoying trying to hunt down an item of a specific type-combination (say, Sky Forge Tool) and the interface is only partially "there" in terms of helping.

This is worst when you are trying to do something precise. You can't do the search-highlight across a specified quality combination using a filter, you have to manually and slowly search the whole property by swapping which quality your mouse is over in a tooltip. It's fucking agonizing.

On the shelf it goes. Maybe I can come back when other people have fixed this game's interface woes, just like its predecessor. Also the guy who writes this stuff is annoying and I would like to see this style of game in a better writer's hands.

Actually that's probably Pentiment lol

Gameplay - If you've played Cultist Simulator, this is a more refined, though more chill, version of that. If you haven't you put objects and cards into work stations to make things happen and then do something else for a minute while that finishes. You can pause or fast forward at any time though, so you're usually only waiting around when you want to be. The system of soul and skill and how they level up and how you discover new recipes and workstations are all very compelling. I'm not sure if there is a way to lose the game, but I never felt like I might have been close to losing, so it's much chiller than Cultist Simulator was where a lot of the discovery centered around how not to die.

Story - The story is interesting and cryptic, though almost all of it is told as "things are happening in the world around you, but you can just focus on your books." I think that works pretty well with the gameplay, though it does leave you feeling a little disconnected at times. I suppose that's intentional as Hush House is pretty isolated.

Aesthetics - The aesthetics are nice and mysterious. I like that everything's on one "map" and you zoom in and out to move around. The graphics convey the mysterious nature of your surroundings well.

I have mixed feelings on this game. The biggest issue with this game is the fact it overstays its welcome. Which applies to the skill leveling system, as well as the room exploration - both of these being the primary gameplay elements. This is absolutely a game you will have to brief the wiki on. Learning the recipes by experimentation is probably fun, but it will extend a 40+ hour game to an 80+ hour game.

The writing, while beautiful, is so convoluted you'll most certainly also have to use the wiki to find out who the fuck "Hours" are. And holy fuck the soul card progression. Yes, it's completely possible to assign the wrong skills to soul cards and soft-lock your ability to upgrade your soul cards.

There's a great game here. But it's in dire need of some trimming of the fat. Or at least some reduced requirements to unlock rooms. Or at least a fast travel button to go back to town. Why would you not add that if you go to town multiple times a day every day?

This game is addictive when you get your groove. Its immersive and you feel like you're actually an occult librarian sorting through forgotten tomes. But it grinds to a painful crawl in the mid-late game. Maybe one day I'll come back and finish. Maybe one day I'll unlock all the rooms. But unfortunately, for now, much like this review: tl;dr