Attention, dusty creeps who want to play poker with the Wickerman! I found one, a videogame you might enjoy. That game is Hillthorn, a spooky investigative cardgame from Fool Moon and Finnegan Motors – the latter also known for beaming corpo thriller Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination.

Hillthorn is the story of a detective hired to investigate a disappearance at a secluded mountain community. One of the first things you do, after hassling a worryingly stained forest ranger for directions, is cross a line of salt on the trail. Seems like something a person familiar with the occult would avoid doing, but you are a Private Eye, armed with logic and cynicism. Besides, all of this is presented via the medium of cards. Who’s afraid of cards? What are they going to do, give you a paper cut? Ouch! Oh, maybe don’t bleed on the salt.

Hillthorn works a bit like Cultist Simulator and The Horror At Highrook. You’ve got some verb cards, like Talk, Search and Investigate, which you can pop into a slot in top left. This creates another slot or slots, into which you can plonk cards for things you want to address, travel to, or study. To initiate the action, you click the magnifying glass on the right – usefully, it shows a tick when you’ve already performed that action.

This produces more cards, dealt onto a tray and cautiously turned over. And so you continue, pulling more plot and omen from the deck, until you reach a milestone of some kind – “why of course, I’ll accept that contract to go look for your missing daughter on this evidently cursed mountain” – that changes the scene and hands you a brand new deck. Some cards can’t be used, serving as observations about the person, object or situation – “Naive”, “Anxious”, “Typical”. I’ve yet to find a Running Away Screaming card but that’s surely a possibility.

The immediate beauty of the game is how the cards sketch out or intimate various unseen actions and relationships, sometimes hinting at an actual world represented by the deck – a world that looms behind you with Platonic menace, spilling sunlight and shadow across your shapeshifting worktable. You want to turn your head, but you can’t. Some of the cards allude more explicitly to an engulfing 3D space. One of the early delights is a radio card, for example, which you can switch on and off. The radio has realistic audio, growing tinny when you drop it into the action slot.

There are a few other items that carry over between scenes – a pocketwatch, used to advance time (PSA: Ranger man suggests you don’t stay on the mountain after dark), and a journal that contains a few hints about goals, together with the Settings screen. It seems to be a more directed experience than other games in this genre, though much is left unspoken.

Hillthorn has a demo on Steam, with the full game launching in November this year. If you like folk horror and you simply can’t get through reading a terms of service without massacring some Conquerer Wyrms, you might also like The Killing Stone.