Home Open

The visiting of an open house is an activity eminently suitable for simulation by parser game. In Home Open, you're a prospective owner-renovator checking out a two-storey home. You get to observe the arrangement of rooms, jot critical shorthand notes about the furnishings on your pad, which is fun (NOTE BEDSTEAD) and generally poke around in a state of mild suspicion. Then comes unusualness – though some of the pre-unusualness prose sneaks through.

Home Open develops with a sense of mounting mystery, but I found the outcome to be too ambiguous for a satisfying pay-off. To its credit, the outcome prompted me to re-enter the game to seek out more information (did I miss something? I don't think I did). When I couldn't find anything new, I sat back and thought 'Hm,' my eyes focussing on a point slightly beyond the pane of the screen.

A few of the game's inaccessible props and portals don't yield to other obvious objects to which one might hope they would. e.g. A conspicuously interesting place that's too dark to see into still can't be seen into after obtaining a light source. Are the game's slice-of-life qualities looking for a fight with typical adventure game behaviours, and with prop-puzzle pairings like the light and the hole? Home Open is confusing like this, because sometimes the slice-of-life wins very decidedly and sometimes the classic adventure game puzzles win very decidedly.

Sometimes in life, a sideboard is just a sideboard. But ultimately, Home Open didn't radiate as much drama or explanation as I wanted, or as I felt it signalled it would.

A small and mysterious puzzle game that keeps you guessing right up until the end.

An initially peaceful exploration becomes very tense once events swing into motion, with a palpable sense of dread and claustrophobia once you realise how limited a space you are in.

Never holding your hand, the game instead encourages you to seek solutions yourself, but was not so cryptic that I hit a wall during play.

A chilling and prophetic fable about the importance of inspecting houses properly before you move in?

Who knows, but I enjoyed it! Def worth a go.

Parser games are a matter of personal taste. This one is fun and well written. Loved the little details about the house.

But I hate parser games and found myself getting stuck more often than not. It's so much fun, but for me this will take another round of two to crack. My frustration is this, like many parser games, gets so frickin specific. It's a good fun game, but eh not everyone's tea cup.