Hillthorn

Overview

Hillthorn is a dark detective mystery from Fool Moon and Finnegan Motors, published by Raw Fury, that launched on November 10, 2026 for Windows, macOS, and Linux. A child named Olivia went missing near Mount Hillthorn, and you play the outsider detective hired by her mother Abigail to find her. The catch that makes the game stand apart: not a single word is spoken or written in the entire story. Every clue, character, and location is a card, and every interaction is a combination of two cards.

GameSpew rated it 8/10 at launch, praising the multiple routes through the case and the puzzle design while warning that the card format and the midnight reset will not be for everyone.

Who it is for: players who loved Return of the Obra Dinn or Strange Horticulture, fans of mystery games that respect their intelligence, and anyone short on time who wants a complete case in an evening.

Who it is not for: anyone who needs spoken dialogue or text to stay engaged, and players who find repeating segments under a clock stressful.

How the Card System Works

The whole game runs on one verb: combine. Every screen gives you a table with two slots. The left slot takes an action card, the right slot takes a subject card: a person, object, location, or clue. Confirm the pair with the magnifying glass button, or click a card to drop it in a slot and press Space.

Three action cards do almost all the work:

• Talk questions a character. Add a clue as a topic to ask about something specific.
• Investigate examines an object, person, or clue to reveal a hidden detail.
• Explore moves you to a location card you have uncovered.

Reading the icons on each card saves more time than anything else. The upper-left corner of every card shows what it responds to: a speech bubble marks someone you can question, a magnifying glass marks something you can investigate, and a map marks a place you can travel to. Card colors carry meaning too:

Thoughts and feelings cards are informational only. GameSpew's review calls this out as the game's quiet genius: because you can only act on cards the game has dealt you, dead ends are rare. You rarely get stuck with nothing to try; you just might not have found the right card yet.

The Ranger example, step by step

The Ranger at Mount Hillthorn teaches the talk-about-a-clue pattern that the whole game builds on:

1. Place Investigate in the left slot and the Ranger card in the right slot.
2. Confirm with the magnifying glass. This reveals the stains on his shirt as a new clue card.
3. Replace Investigate with Talk, keeping the Ranger in the subject slot.
4. Add the stains card as the topic.
5. Confirm. The conversation hands you the mud clue, and the case moves forward.

Every guarded villager follows the same shape: investigate first to find the detail they care about, then talk about it. If a conversation stalls, the context card it produced usually explains why, and what to bring next time.

Time, the Pocket Watch, and the Midnight Reset

Time is the real antagonist in Hillthorn. Your pocket watch advances as you travel and act, and specific events trigger at specific hours: Abigail arrives at your office at the start of the case, and the church holds its sermon every day at 6pm. Attending an event means being in the right place at the right time, which means budgeting travel.

At midnight the day resets hard. You return to the edge of the woods, and you lose the physical items you picked up during the day. What you keep is knowledge: passwords, facts, and leads persist as knowledge cards in your inventory, and your detective's notebook records your objectives.

Three habits make the loop painless:

1. Recollect efficiently. If you learned where a key is kept, go straight to it on the next loop, take it to the lock, and spend the rest of the day on what the door opens. Do not re-walk the path that taught you about the key.
2. Use shortcut cards. After you complete a sequence a few times, the game deals you a shortcut card that skips the repeated steps. Take it every time; it frees daylight for new leads.
3. Check prerequisites before winding the watch. Before fast-forwarding to an evening event, verify you already hold the clue or item that event depends on. Winding into an appointment unprepared wastes the day.

Getting Started: Your First Day, a Working Order of Operations

The case opens at your office. This sequence sets up every early lead without wasting daylight:

1. Advance the pocket watch until Abigail arrives and hires you. Her cards give you the case: Olivia and Jeremiah went missing near Mount Hillthorn.
2. Travel to the mountain area. Grab the Ranger conversation covered above; the mud clue unlocks the trail branches.
3. Explore the village thoroughly before pushing up the trails. Inspect your starting location and each new area for location, object, and character cards. Zoom into cards: double-clicking or enlarging a card reveals painted symbols that matter later.
4. Cluster your board. Keep characters on one side, locations in the middle, and your active lead next to the action slots. When a lead dies, move its cards away from your work area so you stop touching them.
5. Prioritize anything that references Olivia's last known whereabouts over town folklore. The village is mazelike and daylight is finite; wandering burns it.

Tips: Investigation Principles That Carry You to the Endings

Never brute-force combos. Trying every card in every slot is the fastest way to burn a day. The game signals compatibility through icons, borders, and color. If a card has no speech bubble, talking to it does nothing. If an investigation icon is absent, that detail is not there.

Match the person to the topic, not the mood. Characters react to evidence, not to pleasantries. Showing the wrong evidence to a hostile member of the Flock, the village's insular locals, can shut a conversation down for the day.

Read context cards before acting again. The cut-corner reaction cards are the game's only form of feedback. A character holding back, a door refusing a key, a path staying dark: the reason is on a context card you already hold.

One thread at a time. The board makes it tempting to run three leads in parallel. The clock punishes it. Finish or shelve a lead before opening the next one.

Break-ins are a choice, not a failure. When a locked house blocks a lead, you can pick the lock slowly, find the key, or force entry, which costs health and raises suspicion. Multiple endings mean multiple legitimate routes; suspicion is a currency you are allowed to spend.

Endings and Replay Structure

Hillthorn has multiple endings, and the run structure is built for replays. A single ending takes roughly two hours. Because knowledge persists across loops and shortcuts eliminate repeated busywork, a second run moves at three or four times the pace of the first. Each route you did not take last time (the break-in instead of the key, the sermon instead of the empty church) is a different ending's front door.

The 18 achievements map cleanly onto this structure: they reward completing specific routes, finding specific clue chains, and finishing the case under different behavior patterns. Save-anytime means you can snapshot before a commitment like a break-in and sample both branches from one save.

Platforms, Accessibility, and Performance

The game runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, which is rare for the genre. Everything is mouse-driven and works on trackpads; a touch-only mode exists, and the mobile version on Google Play mirrors the PC build for phones and tablets. Accessibility options go beyond the usual: adjustable text size (relevant for the notebook), camera comfort settings, color alternatives for the color-coded cards, custom volume controls, and a playable-without-timed-input mode. The time pressure comes from the in-fiction clock, not from real-world timers, so you can pause and think indefinitely.

Full controller support covers DualShock and DualSense pads, and saves sync through Steam Cloud with Family Sharing enabled.

FAQ

Is Hillthorn really wordless? Yes. There is no spoken dialogue and no written dialogue in the story. The notebook and card names use minimal text for UI clarity, but the case itself is told entirely through card art and combinations.

How long is Hillthorn? Around 2 hours to a first ending. Seeing multiple endings and cleaning up achievements takes 6 to 10 hours depending on how much you re-route on replays.

Do you lose all progress at midnight? No. Physical items reset, but all knowledge (passwords, leads, facts) persists, and shortcut cards let you skip sequences you have already completed.

Is there combat? None. Failure states come from wasted time and suspicion, not from death.

Is it on consoles? Not at launch. It released November 10, 2026 on PC (Windows, macOS, Linux) and mobile. No console versions have been announced.

How does it compare to other detective games? It trades dialogue trees and text logs for pure visual deduction. Where Obra Dinn makes you deduce identities from deduction tables, Hillthorn makes you deduce conversations from card pairings. If you want the purest version of that idea, this is it.

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