Your House [PC] | REVIEW

Betrayal, mystery, and a strange house that is rife with secrets and a peculiar history… what more could you want from a text-driven puzzle adventure? With its clever conundrums, engaging storytelling, unique word-based progression, and unnerving atmosphere, Your House will grip you in from the first page and doesn’t let go until the very end.

Check out some screenshots down below:

Your House puts players in the role of Debbie Clough, a young girl who has been sent to Hicksville Boarding School by her overbearing father, but that constantly finds herself in trouble on campus. This comes to a head on her eighteenth birthday, when she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating with her best friend, so she pours beer over them and leaves… only to end up in an accident. Not the best way to spend your birthday, right?

She’s fine, but upon arriving back at her room, discovers a mysterious envelope containing a postcard with an address on it and a key with the tag ‘happy birthday’. With nothing to lose, she decides to sneak out of the school and make her way to the address, where she discovers a peculiar house. She makes herself at home there, but the questions remain: who led her to the house, and does she really belong there?

What follows is an intriguing mystery that I really enjoyed seeing unravel. Your House tells its story in an almost novel-like style with its scrolling pages of text, but its engaging writing and constant sense of suspense always left me wanting more. I wanted to learn more about the house, I wanted to learn more about the mysteries within it, and I wanted to learn more about Debbie’s connection to it, and across each of the game’s five chapters, there was always that little SOMETHING that kept the mystery alive. Whilst I’ll admit that the ending did feel a little bit predictable, the journey there kept me hooked in from start to end.

“Your House succeeds in delivering a rich and immersive narrative experience, supported by challenging puzzles and a striking visual style.”

When it comes to the gameplay, you can expect to do a LOT of reading in Your House. It’s not quite a visual novel, but instead feels like an interactive book, where players are able to click on certain highlighted words in order to interact with the story in a variety of ways – whether that’s by adding additional details to the paragraph, interacting with items, navigating your surroundings, or even completing QTE-style events. It’s a clever idea that makes the storytelling of the game (and the constant reading) all the more engaging.

The only downside to this was when moving between areas of the house. Each room found within the house essentially has its own individual page, with players having to click specific room names in the text in order to move between them. Again, it’s a clever idea, but it’s one that can draw exploration out, which could get a little tedious when you’re stumped as to how you need to progress and find yourself having to wander the various rooms of the house looking for clues. It would have been nice if there was some sort of quick-travel mechanic in place, if only to streamline the process and stop players from having to read through some of the same paragraphs of text over and over again – something that could prove immersion-breaking when it repeated text that was no longer relevant to the situation you were in.

Where Your House does shine is with its puzzles. There are an array of illustrations that are found across the pages in the game that’ll lead to puzzles, with an abundance of sophisticated enigmas to face that’ll really leave players scratching their head. Whilst it mostly boils down to interacting with the objects in the illustrations in varying ways, there’ll also be plenty of occasions where you might need to use an item or piece of information that you’ve found in a different page to solve a puzzle – I’d definitely recommend having a pen and paper or smartphone handy to keep notes, because believe me, you’ll need them. You’ll even unlock special gadgets that have to be used in some puzzles, and whilst these are unique to the chapter they’re found in, they add a sense of variety to the puzzle-solving that proves that Your House has plenty of neat little tricks up its sleeve.

Check out some screenshots down below:

I really liked the puzzles found in the game, though trust me, they can be TOUGH. There where a few occasions where I found myself stuck for ages before I was able to solve a puzzle, and whilst the solution was always logical in the end, there were times where the process of getting there could feel a bit too cryptic. There’s a handy hint system in place that’ll give you a nudge in the right direction if needed, but even then, you still might find yourself perplexed a lot. I don’t think there was anything unfair or illogical puzzle-wise, but maybe a little bit of extra direction here and there wouldn’t have gone amiss (particularly on puzzles such as the red lamp where I didn’t realise that I had to hold a button down in order to progress… it kept me stuck for longer than I would like to admit).

Visually, Your House looks really slick, with its noir comic book style perfectly befitting the game’s tense sense of mystery. The occasional animated sequence always looked really cool, and whilst they were simple in design, they added a cinematic flair to the experience. The sound design was top-notch too, with the background music and sound effects found across each room all adding to the tense atmosphere. It really complements the storytelling of the game and adds to the uneasy feeling that something isn’t quite right in the house… it’s good stuff.

Developer: PATRONES & ESCONDITES
Publisher: PATRONES & ESCONDITES
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed)
Website: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2667740/YOUR_HOUSE/