The House

“The House is one of those games that lives or dies by vibes. While the setup calls to mind Maniac Mansion – you need to assemble a four-person team of stereotypes to explore and escape a spooky house – we’re actually in manic territory here. Those stereotypes aren’t ‘jock’, ‘nerd’, or ‘cheerleader,’ but ‘Lassie with a catnip habit’, ‘extra-dimensional time wizard’, or ‘Actually Dracula’, for one thing. And this straightforwardly-presented Twine game doesn’t involve any puzzle-solving – you just start out talking to each of the four characters in your party to get the first half of their backstories, then lawnmower through the rooms, each of which will prompt one character to infodump the other half of their pop-culture-reference-hammed background and then find a key. Once you bring all four keys to the attic, you win.

“The eight characters on offer are distinctive, but there aren’t many interactions between them – there’s like one short passage that varies based on who you’ve chosen as your main character, which also provides some customized narration, but each character is associated with a different room, and just spews out their spiel the same way every time, regardless of who’s listening. As a result the game supports two full playthroughs to see everyone’s plots, since almost all of the game’s text will be different if you choose the first four characters and then the last four, but after that diminishing returns set in pretty quickly.

“So with limited gameplay and a ten-minute or so runtime, as I said The House’s success really comes down to vibes, and the good news here is that while there’s a range in how well the game’s lolrandom humor landed for me, there are definitely some strong points. Some of the characters are a bit humdrum – that time wizard was kind of a dud – but I loved the Terminator pastiche, who per the movie is a robot who’s been sent back in time to assassinate the future leader of the human resistance, but has somehow adopted the identity, mannerisms, and accents of a Brooklyn cabbie from the 60s, and whose story winds up going even farther afield from those already-zany beginnings to involve babies, lava, and moral dilemmas. Similarly, I laughed at the fact that the alien-pretending-to-be-a-human’s cover story is instantly unbelievable, not because of the way it keeps accidentally mentioned being birthed in an extrasolar hatchery, but because it says it was raised in a middle-income household, when per the game ‘there hasn’t been a middle income since 1971’ (I’d date it later, to the oil shock, but that’s a nitpick).

“Sure, many of the pop-culture references seem unnecessary, and as I said, the characters are hit and miss. But the ratio is solid enough, and the time commitment low enough, that The House more than justifies its existence.”

So.

That’s the review I’d prefer to have written about The House. But we need to talk about Jessica.

In that roster of eight characters, only two are female, and actually one of them is a male-coded extradimensional demon bound into a doll, so that just leaves Jessica. Here’s her blurb on the character-select screen:

"Jessica is an aspiring writer who could never really get off the ground after college. She is a little plain and no one would call her unattractive, but her only serious relationship recently ended in a bad way. Now she is thirty-something, living with her parents again, and left asking herself: 'Is it too late for love?'"

Her internal narration is presented in a flowery script, she’s a big fan of romance novels, her dialogue is broken up by stammers and stutters to convey her low self-esteem, and her “relationship” ended because she wanted a baby and her commitment-phobe partner-only-by-a-technicality immediately dumped her when he found out. What’s worse, while the jokes for most of the other characters are designed to make you laugh at what they say, many of Jessica’s invite you to laugh at what a pathetic girl she is, like this bit of dialogue: “I-I love this house, don’t you? I can… imagine me cleaning it for you.”

“Lady with romance-addled brain” isn’t necessarily a terrible idea for a comedy character, let me say, and there are some gags that gesture towards how this could have actually worked: I giggled at the absurdity of a description that said “Mirrors line the walls, like in a romance drama set in a hardware store.” But again, she’s the only female character, the majority of the jokes are unfunny and at her expense, and nothing kills the good-natured buzz of a silly comedy game like lazy stereotypes. I wish I didn’t have to write this addendum, because most of the game is an inoffensive fun time with occasional moments of inspired wackiness – but here we are.

This is a Twine game where you pick from 8 or so characters to form a team of 4, then investigate rooms in a house one at a time to get a key and experience an attack plus some backstory, followed by a final finish.

Each character has different thoughts and reactions to the events. On my first playthrough, I was a time travelling powerful wizard lord. On the second, I was a cyborg assassin.

One character is just a regular woman, which was a surprise. She related a lot of things she saw to romance films (which reminded me of my mom, who watches Hallmark all the time and who I've started to consult about romance tropes when I write to see what's popular these days).

A lot of the writing was funny. Much of it was also a non-sequitur. The rewards at the end made me chuckle a bit.

Overall the story didn't have much cohesion, but the concept is a fun one. Extending it further could possibly result in combinatorial explosion.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/6/26
Playtime: .75hr, 2 playthroughs (all characters)

There are WAY more past times and diversions in this world than any one lifetime could possibly consume. It’s cool, evolution and human nature got us covered. As individuals, our unique cranial chemical cocktails prune that jungle for us, categorizing pursuits on a spectrum from “THIS IS MY CALLING!” to “Seriously, no thank you.” Somewhere on that spectrum is a bucket for “I don’t think it’s for me, but.. that’s really kinda cool innit?” At some point in my life, Quilting got dumped into that bucket.

Hear me out.

There is a specific KIND of quilting that, despite nominally residing WELL outside the middle of my mental road, seizes my attention every time. These are the collaborative quilts, often commemorating some event, tragedy, accomplishment, or shared experience. Each square of these kinds of quilts are miniature artworks of their own, capturing its creator’s relationship to the common thematic inspiration. Whether crudely rendered or lavishly accomplished they all seem to tell a self-contained STORY - in evocative, suggestive shorthand. By unifying them, side by side in a grid, any overarching themes or narrative is purely accidental. The purpose is just to honor each of them, conveying the BREADTH of experience whether those experiences have anything to say to each other or not.

The House somehow summoned this from the deep recesses of my brain. Specifically its central conceit: four wildly divergent characters, trapped together through unspecified means, interacting to escape a house. You select one of the characters to inhabit, becoming privvy to their thoughts, then three more to share your trial. You get maybe two scenes of character exploration each (one an intro dialogue, another a thematic room) then shuttle to endgame. It’s kind of a wafer thin conceit whose whole purpose is to stitch these individual squares together. The narrative is not overarching, it is an excuse to get things stitched up.

I played twice, experiencing each square of fabric. First time I was a (presumably) collie, accompanied by a middle-age spinster, a (Spoiler - click to show)cyborg from the future with a mission in the past cabbie, and a ventriloquist. Next time, a vampire with a time/dimension lord, a totally normal (Spoiler - click to show)not-Alien Guy and a Creepy Doll.

In this short work, each had ABOUT the depth of a square of fabric, honestly in the best possible way. Their stories were tight, succinct, and suggestive of larger tales out of sight. Most were pretty funny. Some were surprisingly dark. Many played with their disparate communication paradigms in very fun ways - Lattie and Guy were particular standouts here. Each is shot through with its own playful, sly humor. I don’t think the phrase “like some kind of O+ pinata” will ever leave me. It is a pathology of my own that I envisioned them as fabric squares, ready for quilting.

I think this pathology was enabled by the self-acknowledged thinness of the scenario and gameplay, really just a substrate to knit these characters onto, then enable closer per-square inspection. The work acknowledges this by highlighting that replay is really about the central protag-selected character - diving deeper into an individual square. Which is really how I consume these quilts anyway?

Now, given how widely varied individual responses can be, I can certainly envision players who just DON’T GET QUILTING. It’s how I feel about Bird Watching. For those folks, the resolute lack of any overarching narrative thread or theme will be a dealbreaker. The fun, disparate nature of the cast might get lost, or if not lost just not feel complete. This is how chemical brains work, and they’re not wrong. Certainly the lack of deeper narrative glue is front and center, proudly announcing itself as NOT A PRIORITY HERE. For those not given to quilting this could prove unsatisfying.

For me? It reminded me there is this whole human endeavor I encounter infrequently, doesn’t really spur me get involved with, but tickles me just a little bit that it exists at all.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Mosaic Narrative
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project, I think I would give a little more energy to Sophie. She was really the only one that didn’t reward close inspection. Her story beats came across as both samey and less developed than Saargroff.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

…and learn profound inner social truths. The game directly starts with the most important choices (really, the only substantial choices) at the beginning - deciding your viewpoint character and the rest of the party. Then you go explore a room, get a backstory reveal from one of your companions, repeat until you’ve learned about everyone (including yourself), (Spoiler - click to show)get your Puppy of Friendship, and end the game. The number of available characters, eight, is perfectly suited for a second playthrough with the characters you didn’t pick the first time.

Each character has their inner monologue written in a different font and color (Some can be a little hard to read). One thing The House does well is make them all have a unique voice, if a bit too reliant on humor and pop culture references. Zany referential humor isn’t quite my personal taste, so a lot of the stories left me cold, though there I did like the two that stepped into darker territory.

I did find it kind of weird that apparently guys can run a whole spectrum from space aliens to weird robots but girls can only be a mundane romance writer or a literal dog (the doll doesn’t count). Certainly that’s not an automatic red flag, there’s a lot of good stuff with a “mundane girl meets the otherworldly” premise and an ordinary person can have great character development. However, I never got the sense if Jessica (the writer) was a character we were meant to root for - I also felt this confusion with some of the other characters like the comedy duo or the doll, but not nearly to this extent - or go “hah, look at that unmarried girl and her silly notions, now let’s go back to our fantasies of cool wizards and vampires.” I wasn’t fond of this move.

Without the above considerations, I would feel comfortable saying that The House is a cool proof-of-concept for a larger work. Along with tightening up the writing, adding some puzzles or really taking advantage of the “let’s put a bunch of characters from wildly different genres together” premise by adding whole party interactions (since it’s mostly your chosen main character listening to the others monologue) could be done to expand the foundation.