Review: Theme Manor

The game the National Trust couldn't cancel

I’ve spent much of the last week playing Theme Manor, a fun new game created by members of the development teams behind the old classics Theme Park and Theme Hospital - and very much in the same vein - in which you have to design and manage your own Stately Home.

Initially developed in partnership with the National Trust, the Trust pulled the plug on the design team halfway through development, citing those old chestnuts ‘irreconcilable differences in values’ and ‘gratuitous levels of violence and gore.’ Fortunately the developers were able to raise the highly impressive $5,318,008 on Kickstarter - one of the largest sums ever raised for a computer game crowd-funder¹ - and were able to complete the project despite the National Trust’s attempted cancellation.

Those of us who backed the Kickstarter got it a week in advance, and it has now just gone on general release.

Gameplay

The premise is that you’ve just inherited a dilapidated stately home with a rapidly declining bank balance, and that you have to renovate it and turn it into a top tourist destination before you go bankrupt.² Gameplay and graphics are very much in the style of its classic 90s predecessors, with the same trademark detail-orientation and sense of humour.³

A quick-start game plunges you straight into the action after choosing a number of parameters: difficulty level, the circumstances under which you inherited the hall (including gambling debts, experimental architect and excessive travel - each of which can lead to certain events triggering) and location, for which choices include the Home Counties (expensive land and staff, but good proximity to foreign tourists), Wales (cheap land but it rains almost every day⁴) and Yorkshire (where the staff are hard-working but bloody-minded). Advanced start provides you with a much wider range of options, including the ability to customise every member of your family tree, who will then appear in portraits and statues.

You begin with a couple of rooms open, a basic car park and a cheap tearoom that looks like Ivy’s cafe from Last of the Summer Wine. You expand by ‘renovating’ rooms, both ‘upstairs’ such as the master bedroom or dining room, and ‘downstairs’ such as the kitchens and servant’s quarters, as well as building outdoor facilities such as a maze, falconry exhibit and adventure playground. In addition to this you’re responsible for hiring staff and volunteers⁵, maintenance and hygiene⁶, and much more.

Almost everything can be upgraded and customised, from the ornaments in the grand hall to the depth of the ha-ha. You can lay out guided tours, produce museum brochures and place your own period-style furniture.⁷ Refreshment stands are obviously needed - and former Theme Park players will be pleased to know that the classic trick of dialling up the salt still works. As you attract more international tourists, you’ll need to diversify your fare: Japanese like sushi bars, the Italians want pizza and the Americans demand burger bars.⁸ Everyone likes scones with clotted cream and jam in the tearoom, which periodically upgrades as you hit certain milestones, in the manner of⁹ the original Civilization’s palace.

In addition to money, the two main resources you’re managing are customer satisfaction and fame. The former must be kept high to ensure repeat visitors; it is improved by more and better rooms, facilities and amenities, and damaged by shoddy services, unkempt grounds and various money-gouging tactics you may choose to resort to. Fame is harder to get, but is essential for expanding your visitor base beyond the local area - and particularly to attract high spending international tourists.

In some cases, customer satisfaction and fame are aligned - but not always. For example, the more you expand your falconry display the better the customer satisfaction, and once you get enough rare birds it will start improving fame also.¹⁰ With the maze, however, beyond a certain size customer satisfaction drops off, as it turns out visitors don’t like spending their entire visit lost inside a giant maze - but making it bigger will still boost your fame.¹¹

Getting fame to certain thresholds unlocks special rooms and buildings, including various follies, a hermit hut (complete with hermit), an artist in residence, secret passageways and the mad scientist. The last is particularly important because it enables new gameplay elements, including time travel missions to retrieve historic artefacts, as well as dinosaur cloning, which allows you to add a dino park to your manor grounds.

This in turn unlocks the second, and altogether stranger, part of the game.

Dinosaur Mayhem

Whenever a storm occurs after the dino park is built, there is a small chance of an escape occurring - with the chance increasing with the size and number of dinosaurs in the dino park. At this point the game transitions to a first person shooter - like Doom or Half-Life - using the Unreal engine, in which you have to kill all of the dinosaurs before they eat the staff and visitors.¹²

In contrast to the more relaxed earlier part of the game, this section of the game is incredibly intense, fast-paced and violent, where your reactions will be tested to the limit to keep ahead of the dinos. Bodies pile high - both humans and dinosaurs - with masses of blood and entrails spraying in every direction. A hyper-realistic anatomy model ensures that disembowelments, trampling and limbs being torn off are rendered in graphic detail - with even the herbivores a potentially lethal threat. Meanwhile, the effects of the different weapons you can find to fight back with, from Kalashnikovs to chainsaws, are depicted with no less attention, brutality and gore.¹³

It was at this point that the National Trust, already frustrated by the supposed ‘cultural insensitivity’ of the design team, finally pulled the plug. Stereotyped food carts they could (just about) tolerate; graphic dinosaur violence, less so. But the developers refused to have their creative vision censored - and the rest is history.

Personally, I think the National Trust was a bit oversensitive. Sure, maybe some people would be distressed at the sight of an allosaurus swallowing a young family whole, or a pack of velociraptors ripping into the bodies of fleeing teenagers - but doesn’t that make it even more enjoyable when you blow them to pieces with a rocket-propelled grenade? As Iona Money-Pott, columnist for the Daily Telegraph, wrote:

‘This is cancel culture gone mad. Just because some woke palaeontologists in their ivory towers claim that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed, why should the National Trust try to spoil our fun? In my day, we spent our time playing good wholesome games like Grand Theft Auto and it never did us any harm.

The National Trust claim they want to diversify their audience, but they don’t seem to care about young men in their teens and twenties - most of whom wouldn’t be seen dead in a National Trust property. Theme Manor might have tempted some of them to take a visit - but the Trust would rather they were murdering each other like in the documentary Adolescence, rather than taking part in healthy dinosaur mayhem in the grounds of our glorious stately homes.

Iona Money-Pott, Daily Telegraph

Assuming you survive the onslaught, once the last dinosaur is killed you are shown a victory screen, in which you can be seen standing upon a mound of slaughtered dinosaurs. At this point, you are offered the opportunity to quit, start a new game, or return to your original manor (with dino damage miraculously repaired) to continue building and expanding in sandbox mode.

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The last laugh

Despite having been left high and dry when the National Trust pulled out, the developers had the last laugh - as one of the Kickstarter ‘stretch goals’ they hit was for a ‘decolonisation’ mod.

If you install this mod (which comes included with the base game), a menu button is added with the option ‘decolonise your manor’. If you click it, you receive a prompt saying, ‘Warning: selecting this option may permanently damage your heritage. Are you sure you wish to continue?’ If you do continue then apologies for slavery are added to all of your family portraits, the scones in the tearoom are replaced with vegan alternatives and all of your statues are replaced by statues of black Welsh disabled women trade unionists.¹⁴

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Overall Rating: 9/10. Theme Manor flawlessly blends the best of the classic simulation and first person shooter genres, combining surprising depth, modern graphics and the charming humour of its classic predecessors.

Theme Manor is available to purchase for £69.69 from Steam.

1. This could have been even larger had they got Zack Polanski involved.

2. In a cut-scene clearly added after the developers parted ways with their initial partner, losing the game triggers a clip of you handing the keys over to the National Trust as the front door slams shut behind you.

3. Who doesn’t remember ‘slack tongue’?

4. The Welsh tourist board lodged a formal complaint over this, but it turns out that yes, it really does rain that much in Wales.

5. Volunteers are cheap, but their skill sets are highly variable. Money is always tight and figuring out which roles you need to actually pay people for is core to moving up the learning curve.

6. Yes, in true Theme Hospital style you can shoot rats if your manor becomes too unhygienic.

7. If you place things just sticking out into a doorway then sometimes tourists trip over it.

8. Cue complaints from the tofu-eating wokerati about ‘cultural stereotyping’.

9. Or should that be ‘manor of’?

10. In real life, an excellent falconry display can be found at Muncaster Castle - though you may not be as fortunate as I was on one occasion, when a wild peregrine falcon came and joined the captive ones in display.

11. If you make the maze too big, visitors may actually get lost for so long that they starve to death. In a delightful shout-out to another classic Bullfrog game, Dungeon Keeper, there is then a chance that they will become a ghost and start haunting your manor - which is a helpful way to attract ghosts if you’ve not succeeded in obtaining them by other routes.

12. Or you.

13. There is a hard-core mode in which you are limited to the weapons that can be found inside your manor, meaning you have to take on the T-Rexes with shotguns and Mediaeval pikes. Building the Civil War Reenactment Ground can definitely give you the edge if you plan to go down this route.

14. The ideal quango appointee.