House Heir is an upcoming mystery-solving SMP in which players gradually uncover a complex story by finding clues in different areas and talking to characters. I spoke to arteamissing, who is organising the server alongside pancks_, about the project!
The plot begins with players receiving a letter informing them that they’re in the wealthy Lord Harrison’s last will. After travelling to his large mansion, alongside others named in the will, a maid explains that Lord Harrison researched them and believes that they are the most suitable to inherit his wealth and mansion.
The inheritance won’t be quite that easy though for players to get their hands on, because to do so, they must find Lord Harrison’s hidden burial spot somewhere on the property. The clues to its location are within the house. This is no trivial scavenger hunt, with the SMP estimated to last around five months.
“Blue Prince is definitely one of the bigger inspirations,” Artea tells us, referring to an indie puzzle adventure game by Dogubomb and Raw Fury, that released in April. Like Blue Prince, House Heir will see players having to explore a variety of rooms to solve puzzles. “It’s planned currently to have over two hundred rooms, so there’s a lot to explore. Pancks has been working on them, and they’re all unique.”
With such a scale of map and story to explore, balancing the solving of clues with the overall pace of the story will provide a challenge for Artea and Pancks to overcome – though they seem confident in their planning. “It would probably not be possible to stumble across the burial site,” Artea says. “You would need the information to be able to get there.” In addition, the house will be protected from damage by a mod, stopping players from getting into areas they’re not supposed to be in.
“Pancks knows his way around riddles and enigmas – he also works for Arkanis in that regard,” Artea says, referring to the Portuguese-speaking roleplaying SMP ran by Brazilian streamer Pactw. “Pancks knows how to make riddles have the linear line that we want, so we can give breaks, and you would need a lot of the info we’re going to introduce later to be able to solve it.”
House Heir isn’t entirely focused on the story, and there are options for more classic SMP gameplay as well. “You can choose if you want to do the storylines and lore, or if you just want to do SMP, or if you want to do both, that’s completely fine,” Artea says. “We have this huge house that you get to explore if you want to, but otherwise the surrounding area is completely free to explore too. The players will probably need resources to continue the gameplay, so it makes sense if they want to get resources and build their own houses in the surrounding area.”
“You can just explore, you can try to solve riddles. You can also just settle down, collect a bunch of pets, and just be the crazy cat lady you want to be,” Artea says. “There’s definitely enough content for people to play every day if they want to.”
In addition to the house protection mod, the server will have some mods to support a range of gameplay options, as well as the main storyline. “There are going to be some mods for world generation, then there’s going to be mechanics for riddle and puzzles,” Artea says. Artea has also been working on a custom utility mod of their own, to implement into the SMP.
“Obviously we want people to be able to find the burial spot, but we also want them to just generally be engaged with the storyline,” Artea tells us. “I think it’s a really cool story, and I’m excited to be working on it over the next months. We want to present what we’re capable of doing – Pancks and I have been working a lot in the Minecraft sphere and we want to be able to showcase what we’ve learned so far. It’s exciting just generally to be able to present a project that’s not seen as much in the Minecraft sphere – there’s not a lot of mystery and puzzle solving SMPs.”
The adventure kicks off on Saturday 14th June – with the mysteries set to come in thick and fast. “I really look forward to seeing how the players will react to plot twists in the future,” Artea teases. “Even in just the first two weeks there will be a plot twist – and I mean, what isn’t fun about plot twists?”
You can watch House Heir starting from 14th June on the participating players’ streams. The cast features CherryBee_, LittleMissSunMin, mikenlos, RaxynLive, sinaheh, IdrisCarstairs_, Lucastico, thepecanha, amelieBluie, vanshi_tw, idkhonestly__, 174polyester, gussy_gng, WithMayX, LynxyLiam, LilithLuvsYa, RurusLIVE, BadBoyHalo, Shade, and Lumi_Pomme.
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