Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 review – reality-bending daftness

PC; Strange Scaffold
What looks like a glitchy dinosaur-hunting puzzler turns out to be a meta game about game development that the player patches as they go

The haunted house has become a ripe location in which to set weird video games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Blue Prince, Botany Manor and Layers of Fear spring to mind. The manor as a site of danger, supernatural peril, untrustworthy architecture - perfect, surely, for an unsettling experience. Or even a silly experience in unsettling surroundings.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 promises much in its title. It presents initially as a high-concept dinosaur-hunting adventure in spooky house run by a sinister old mogul, then quickly reveals to the player that it knows it is a video game. A broken video game, that is, and it is up to us to patch it as we go.