Intrigue at Oakhaven review

Remastered 2006 first-person puzzler offers some casual Louisiana bayou charm, though the experience can feel swamped by awkward pacing

The year 2006 was a crowded one in the point-and-click genre, and with so many big-name games to choose from, it was easy to miss out on smaller titles. One I wish I’d known about back then was Intrigue at Oakhaven Plantation. The second release from solo developer Cindy Pondillo sent players to Louisiana for a short romp through the swamp to solve puzzles, learn local trivia, get their tarot cards read, and uncover the buried truth about the Allain family tragedy. Luckily for me, a remastered version was recently released featuring full voice acting (previously, there was none), enhanced visuals, and the absence of the word “Plantation” in the title. With the game mostly unchanged from its original ’06 release, it felt like tossing on an old hoodie, cozy and nostalgic, even though I’d never played it before. But with the game mostly unchanged from its original ’06 release, a lack of modern updates and serious pacing problems keep Intrigue at Oakhaven a little too stuck in the past.

You play as a college student named Daphne, then later her cousin Dominic, heading home to Oakhaven at your grandmother’s behest. She’s unable to continue managing the estate and wants to pick an heir via the most sensible method: tasking you both with solving a series of puzzles scattered around the property. Scouring the house as you hunt (but not pixel hunt, thankfully) for inventory items and puzzles, alternating between both cousins, at first I basked in the game’s perfectly retro vibes. From a stately mahogany library to a parlor full of ornate, dated furniture, exploring the Oakhaven manor transported me back to the era of 90s-00s adventure gaming. All the various hallways and rooms are presented in slideshow fashion in a first-person, painterly style, full of detail and lovely to look at. Even the bathrooms are pretty!

Not to be outdone, the outdoor scenery is also beautiful. I especially enjoyed my twilight boat rides through the bayou featuring cute depictions of local critters. Purple, green, and blue hues combine to create impressionistic landscapes that reminded me of Monet – appropriate for the game’s strong French influence, which can be felt immediately as you begin the adventure by reading a letter from your “Grand-mère.” Some characters also pepper their dialogue with French phrases. You’ll pick up lots of vocab words talking to everyone, but you may not totally understand what they mean. (I didn’t.)

The French lessons are just one way Intrigue at Oakhaven keeps its swampy Louisiana backdrop at the forefront. Characters repeatedly comment on the muggy weather and relentless mosquitoes. Outside, a vibrant, layered soundscape brings their complaints to life. Insects buzz. Birds chatter. Swollen doors creak, and water sloshes as you row through the bayou. The sound effects capture the feeling of an oppressive summer heat, hanging in the air like a thick film. Some games are meant to be played late at night with all the lights off. Others are suited to rainy afternoons wrapped in a blanket. This one makes you feel like it’s the middle of August, your A/C’s broken, and there’s a hole in your window screen that’s letting all the bugs in. It’s a great vacation for when you want to forget it’s really cold out or pretend that the sun isn’t setting at 4:30 PM. The environments are so evocative, they’ll warm you up even in the dead of winter.

The music deserves praise, too, and there’s lots of it for a game this small. It alternates between the pensive piano melodies I’ve come to expect in investigatory puzzle games, and jazzier, bluesier tunes that better reflect Louisiana culture. If you can ignore a bit of audio awkwardness like clunky silences while soundtracks restart, a lack of uniform pronunciation for some characters’ names, and bizarre background music in the estate’s billiards room that features lyrics about a jilted lover (and never fully fades out even if someone is talking), then Intrigue at Oakhaven’s sound design is easily one of its most resounding successes.

Unfortunately, all that carefully crafted atmosphere can’t mask that another important part of the experience, the puzzles, are much less detailed. The game is advertised as taking about five hours to finish (I came in around 5:30), so I wasn’t expecting tons of content, but I’d hoped for more variety. Here you solve a slider puzzle, a lights out puzzle, two sets of anagrams, and a path deduction puzzle. You combine a bunch of stuff in your inventory and even use deductive reasoning once, but you also solve seven memory puzzles: two are matching games, one is basically another matching game, and the other four all require you to click things in the right order, starting over if you mess up.

Still, even the repetitive puzzles are elevated thanks to unique sound effects and background music, like the ribbits you hear after finding the matching frogs in an old library book, or the drum track that plays as you memorize a sequence of bongo beats in the estate’s music room. Of course, no game that features a home library would be complete without informative in-universe reading material, and this one is downright edu-Cajun-al! You can search the shelves for Louisiana trivia, a Voodoo history lesson, an overview of herbal medicine, and more. Some info pertains to puzzles; some’s just for fun! If you love to learn, then Oakhaven will intrigue you.

Exploring the estate is simple, requiring only a mouse. Each scene is presented as a still image with an occasional animation for ambiance like a lit fireplace. There’s one view of each room with an exit icon to click if you want to return to the prior area. A drop-down menu lets you (mostly) freely switch between controlling Daphne or Dominic and access their respective inventories. Each cousin finds a unique set of items that only appear when you’re playing as them, but there’s no difference between what areas you can access or how they’re shown to you.

Intrigue at Oakhaven

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Perspective:	First-Person
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Exploration
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium
Theme:	Test trials
Graphic Style:	Simulated realism

Puzzles are triggered by clicking on hotspots around the house, usually with something you pocketed in another room. You can attempt every puzzle as many times as it takes, or press “HOME” on your keyboard to instantly solve them, though most point-and-clickers likely won’t need any help. Which is good, because the game doesn’t offer much, either. Each puzzle has a brief explanation that should’ve been updated in this 2025 remaster to let you read it at will. As is, you only get to hear instructions once before they disappear forever, and there’re already plenty of memory challenges!

In total there are 20 puzzles, ten per cousin, plus two trips through a swamp maze that I won’t count because it’s designed so that knowing the trick of how to navigate it isn’t necessary. The only “penalty” for taking a wrong turn is clicking through a few extra screens (that I liked looking at) before you’re back at the last fork, all of which have only two paths, so you just pick the other one. In my first playthrough, I accidentally missed the puzzle clueing me into how I was supposed to know which way to go, and didn’t even find it until after I’d already finished the maze.

With your time in the swamp a notable exception, the puzzles are detached from both the plot and each other. They’re simply little challenges that Grand-mère laid out for you to complete before you can inherit Oakhaven. Once solved, it’s like they never even existed. They’re also presented one after the other, sandwiched into the middle of the game.

As for what makes up the sandwich bread? Long, uninterrupted dialogues – and I mean looong. The game opens with about 25 minutes of nearly nonstop talking as first Daphne, then Dominic are overwhelmed with exposition, some of which is said identically word-for-word to both characters. There are no cinematics to accompany the dia-longs, and the few NPCs that inhabit the bayou aren’t animated or depicted in close-up portraits. They’re literal background characters, static parts of the scenery forever confined to whatever piece of furniture they’re posed on when you enter a room. So while Grand-mère talks at you for half an hour, you’re staring at the same image of a rich older lady sitting on her couch in her living room.

Later, after all the puzzles are solved, you quickly crash into another dialogue wall, a full hour’s worth that lasts for the rest of the adventure. As the credits finally rolled, I felt like I’d listened to a game more than I’d played one, especially since even during the middle puzzle portion, you have several lengthy chats with multiple characters, like a superstitious cook and a dependable bartender who’re both longtime Oakhaven employees. Always linear conversations, you’re never even choosing what to say. You can click through the voice acting to save time, but there’s no summary later, so speed-read at your own risk.

And you would be taking a great risk, because the story is one of the game's triumphs. There’s no haunting to debunk or case to crack, but unraveling the complicated, troubled history of the Allain family is just as satisfying. It brings decades of lies to light, revealing dark secrets murkier than the mud at the bottom of the bayou. The story is dramatic, the twists are rewarding, and the ending, while conclusive, leaves just enough questions intentionally unanswered to hint at a hypothetical follow-up game, which I’d be interested in playing. The actual writing can be stilted, and the characters who deliver it are mostly one-dimensional information vessels, but the plot itself is quite compelling.

The only problem is how disconnected it is from the rest of the game. Instead of gradually feeding you story morsels, Intrigue at Oakhaven waits to unload almost the entire narrative via the hour-long dialogue at the end, when you’re hit with a flurry of last-minute reveals presented via several blocks of text that take up most of the screen. It’s hard not to wonder if the Allains’ tragic tale would’ve been better off as a novel or a radio play, or at the very least, integrated into the gameplay over the course of a much longer adventure, not compartmentalized from the puzzle-solving and reduced to an info-dump.

With such disjointed pacing, Intrigue at Oakhaven struggles to keep momentum even during the puzzle portion. If it’s not NPCs programmed to talk your ear off, it’s a Ouija Board that takes nearly three full minutes to transmit a message while you watch a planchette crawl around the screen. But stick around afterward to ask your own “yes” or “no” questions – it told me I was going to be rich after several tries! My tarot reading from a swamp priestess wasn’t as promising. Luckily, you can do that as many times as you want, too. Players in search of an atmospheric, story-centric adventure might not mind the slower, stop-and-go pace, but for anyone who prioritizes gameplay or longtime puzzle solvers craving a challenge, a trip to the bayou likely won’t be in the cards.

Final Verdict

Intrigue at Oakhaven delivers what it promises to, updating a short puzzle adventure that hasn’t changed much from its original 2006 release. Charming, detailed graphics combined with the contemplative melodies that accompany them elicit the same desire to explore and investigate as the kind of games that first hooked me on this genre. The swampy setting is vibrant and alive, arguably more so than the characters, who mainly exist to dispense the entire story in two extremely long expositions that bookend the game. Stuffed into the middle is everything else, mainly a showcase of simple, at times same-y, puzzles. It’s hard to enthusiastically recommend a title that features an hour of uninterrupted talking, but if you can forgive the awful pacing, then story-first gamers, casual puzzle lovers, or those who just want to take it easy while they soak in a retro vibe and learn about Louisiana, should generally enjoy their time in the bayou. Ultimately, I (mostly) did.

Lizzie played her own copy of Intrigue at Oakhaven on PC.