As soon as I played the haunting demo of Your House at Steam Next Fest I knew this was no ordinary puzzle game. A mystery thriller, deep inside a puzzle box of a house, all told through a text-based adventure. Developers Patrones y Escondites, you’ve got my attention.
Something about Your House feels very familiar, almost like I know this story from somewhere. Over in Manhattan on 5th Avenue, there’s a real-life apartment designed by architectural designer Eric Clough that gained some notoriety in the early 2000s. Within its walls, he constructed an extensive mystery of codes, ciphers and hidden rooms, all without the owner’s knowledge. Riddles were carved into radiator covers, and secret panels in the walls revealed countless keyholes. The mystery only came to light when the architect himself wrote a fictional letter to the inhabitants, signed by a “former occupant”, alluding to the hidden depths. The space belonged to the owners, sure. But was it really their house?
This is the real-life inspiration for Your House. But I also can’t help but be reminded of many other timeless places I’ve been and stories I’ve heard. Your House is a Borgesian, postmodern puzzle thriller, and forgive me if I draw parallels with House of Leaves but there's isn't a more of a pitch-perfect description of the game than: “Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error” (Aeneid 6. 27) Or… “Here is the toil of that house, and all the inextricable wandering” from the book's chapter IX epigraph.
Like the main character Debbie, it’s hard not to be compelled by Your House. We, the audience, peer back into the 90s and follow the rebellious young girl when, on her 16th birthday, she receives a key to THE HOUSE. The game has an innovative, book-like structure that often feels like reading a novel. But unlike a traditional novel the reader- yes, reader- must actively partake in the story being told and guide Debbie’s hand through the pages.
As you scroll through, certain words are bolded and clickable. Sometimes these take you to new locations, but more often than not Debbie’s actions are guided by the words you click. Sometimes these are purely narrative, and other times they’re pure puzzles. After all, you can’t click the word “cut” if you don’t have a sharp tool in your hand. But where might we find a tool sharp enough in the text?
Besides the pure text passages are more traditional point-and-click escape room moments such as a locked door, a keypad, a piano with keys to press, or a peculiar lock with dials and symbols. Functionally, these are images in the text you can click into. Many of the major locations you could uncover had one of these fixed-view vignettes and each was rendered beautifully in a noir comic visual style.
If you get stuck, you can request a hint by clicking the door icon in the top right. These hints were delivered just as cryptically and sometimes didn’t quite bridge the logic leap as well as I’d have liked. At one particular moment I wasn’t sure what to do next, the hint button returned a “you don’t need a hint here” response. *Best Oliver Twist impression* “Please sir, can I have just a crumb of context?”
Jokes aside, going back to the real centrepiece of Your House is in its text. Even without quite enough clues, it’s really enjoyable just to click around and explore. Throughout the game, the text mirrors what is happening in the narrative. In some passages, text is dark when you haven’t turned a light on. In others, the very pages seem to squeeze and compress to create an intense feeling of claustrophobia. In another moment, you find yourself standing before a long, deep well, and must scroll endlessly to find the bottom. It’s a real physical separation of the player from the action. When Debbie feels most alone, you feel it too.
It’s a novel form of storytelling and puzzle making, and one the studio is quickly making a name for itself with. Whilst I’ve not yet played the studio’s earlier title, Unmemory, it’s known for being: “A game you can read, a book you can play" and this description fits well here, too. It seems as if developers Patrones & Escondites have taken the parts that work so well in Unmemory, and improved upon it for the prequel, Your House.
But I have to look at this from a puzzle perspective, and I have to admit that if anything I think the team could have and should have taken even more risks. Your House is a text-based puzzle game, but it isn’t constrained by traditional text-based mediums. I mean, anything can happen in a video game. Video games can be really, really weird and wonderful, and I kept expecting this game to get stranger, but instead, it pulled all its punches.
I’m surprised that I, Thinky's escape room girl, would say such a thing but by the midpoint, I didn’t want to see another lockbox. I wanted to fall into the dot at the bottom of a question mark. I wanted to break words, to rearrange them, to become lost in language. I wanted to Baba this whole thing and be left questioning my own sanity. I wanted to really feel that quiet, domestic horror of being in a house that isn’t really yours and for that to be reflected in the puzzles.
This mystery game- or novel- imagines what a modern-day text adventure might feel like. It asks a lot of interesting questions about form and function, and physical structure. The puzzles are escape room-like, and satisfying to solve. It’s a dash of “choose your own adventure” though set within a linear puzzle flow with just a sprinkling of “found footage”.
It’s good, but with a little more experimentation, this could be really great. I cannot wait to see what Patrones & Escondites will make next.
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