House

House is a short rpg horror game with a lot of potential. It has a very 80s-90s horror flick feel to it and I was really hoping it would follow along with that.

Sadly, House is currently a mess of a horrible narrative and unfair game design choices.



Easily my biggest problem with the would be with the story. It's very, very badly paced. As I mentioned earlier, the game had a ton of potential in this aspect. I loved the setting of the inn, but then you go to the basement and it turns into one impossible challenge after another.

Everything happened so quickly that the game felt like a trimmed down summary of a movie that's two hours long. Like someone took out every scene that had character development and only kept the scenes that actually moved the plot forwards, and then summarized those too. Besides, I literally predicted the end twist less than a minute into the game.

Speaking of said twist, it was not handled well at all. It could have made sense, but then it was delivered in such a way that it seemed to add the paranormal into play, even though this story would have been better off just sticking to pyschological horror as it would fit much better. In fact, most of the game made little to no sense.



ALSO.



And remember like a few sentences earlier when I said there was little to no character development at all? Yeah, that. Let's talk characters. The game has a main cast of 7 characters. We have our main character, his wife, then this other couple of two, the hotel owner (who was referred to as ''boss'' throughout the game, even though ''owner'' or ''manager'' would have been much better terms to use), this random girl who only appears near the end and the ''agent''.

Most of these characters are there for nothing other than driving the plot forward. They are plain, they have no personality. They are not likeable. There's this girl who appears near the end, like I said, and then seconds after she joins your party you have to choose between leaving her with the killer or trying to save her. I immediately abondoned her, because, I really did not care what happened to her. She's only said like 2 sentences to me anyway.



There were some very cool ideas here, don't get me wrong. Like I already said, I liked the setting and horror movie feel of the game a lot, and there were some really nice scenes, like when something suddenly falls down the chimney, but these just couldn't save this aspect of the game.



Let's move on to the gameplay. And, oh boy, there's no less here to criticize than there was with the story. At the start of the game, there's a bunch of sections where you have to check some random objects to proceed with barely any hints given as to what to check. But it gets much worse in the second half of the game with the game overs.

The biggest problem here, without a doubt, is the absolute bullshit the deaths are. There are multiple scenes where there's a branching corridor and going the wrong way just kills you. Then there's scenes where you have to make a decision and making the wrong one (even though it doesn't seem like it matters at all, like when you have to choose whether you want to save Leslie or Stephanie first) will just give you a game over. The hiding sequences were also horrible, again, you could die just for hiding in the wrong place and the game doesn't give you any sort of a clue as to where you have to hide.

This was especially bad in the final ''ice dungeon'' where there are three identical rooms and you have to hide in one specific place in one specific room, else you'll die.

I should also mention that the game is horribly unpolished. Not only are there bugs pretty much all over the place, a lot of the cutscenes also just don't play out smoothly. It's very easy to lose track of what's happening because you don't get to see the characters' actions as they do something.



Then there's the visuals of the game. It's not a bad looking game, really, it mostly looks pretty nice, even with the rtp. There's some issues here and there, such as how the carpets marking the exit and entrances of the room very commonly broke the already in place carpet's shape, and shift mapping really should have been used. There's also some rooms that just look so out of place, like the ice dungeon near the end.

The light effects were quite nice, even though they barely made any sense, and the light sources probably should have given off much more light than they actually did.



There wasn't much in the way of the soundtrack. Did not pay too much attention, and nothing really stood out to me.

All in all, sadly House is not a game I can recommend, despite it's huge amounts of potential. It's ruined by the pacing, mainly, but also has a lot of other flaws in place. I give it one and a half crazy ''boss'' dude out of five.