A House of Endless Windows

the tension sinks its teeth into you from the very first scene. i was instantly struck by pierce’s relationship with his mother: the invisible hands of control, the words unspoken, the ebb and flow of trust, the loneliness. the house of endless windows acting as the surveillance of the mother’s watchful eye. this dynamic was immediately present from the first conversation as pierce strategizes the quickest path to end it. every subsequent interaction with them i felt that same, familiar discomfort i’ve experienced myself years past. this game understood how to write this relationship very, very well.

this tension compounds with each new mystery: who is the new housekeeper? where is father? what happened to mother by the river? we’re forced to stew in this unease as the perspective centers solely on pierce. avery and his mother serve as an outside perspective but only to a limited degree; they can’t provide the reader with any confirmation or closure since they are only seen through pierce’s eyes; they react to information solely provided by pierce’s perspective. this narrator has to be unreliable, but where exactly do we place that mistrust? you have no choice but to sit with those feelings for the duration of the piece. my favorite horror projects are ones that build this pressure (kiyoshi kurosawa, mentioned in another review, is one of my favorite directors for this reason) and a house of endless windows uses this to its full potential.

the mystery extends past the text to the presentation: gorgeous abstract landscapes of what might be fire and smoke intersected by slashing tendrils that give you just a taste of setting, but never the complete picture. ethereal music swells and lulls you into security just to pull the rug as the next track strikes you with anxious drones. the space opens so wide and never seems to converge—again, never settling on the concrete. (Spoiler - click to show)i do wish this abstraction continued into its conclusion: while the closure with the sister was nice i think it would have been thematic to leave the options open, to leave the proof unfinished.

this was engrossing. i couldn’t put it down. i typically get distracted when reading for extended periods of time but i was so entranced that my body forgot i might have an undiagnosed attention deficiency.

on a final note, i am so impressed to see the writing, art, and music all came from a single artist. literally how dare you. very inspiring work—i wanted to open clip studio to paint some abstract landscapes and toy around with music production immediately upon finishing. i’m very excited to see more work from this artist.

(i wrote a bit about some movies this reminded me of before figuring it was kinda gauche to compare an artist’s work to other projects, but if anyone else loved this game like me and wants to see more works with these themes, i really loved dekalog: one and the reflecting skin. guy who only watches movies voice: getting a lot of movie vibes from this)

I am not a J-horror fan, or even a horror fan in general, but there is one clip from a mid-aughts entry in the genre (I think it was called Pulse, but I am 100% not looking it up to check) that lives rent-free in my head: a guy goes into a sub-basement, hears something weird, and at the end of this dark hallway, sees a strange figure standing there in the shadows. Slowly, slowly, it starts to walk towards him, with this hideously unnatural gait, almost falling once before it gets its limbs back under control. He’s rooted to the spot, just watching as it gets closer, and closer, and closer, mesmerizing in the inevitability of its languid approach.

I don’t know how the sequence ends – I honestly hope it’s just a jump-scare, because that would be the least-scary of the alternatives? – but I find it terrifying; being forced to inhabit the same world with something uncanny for so long, with no choice but to linger on the details of how wrong it is, makes my blood run cold. It’s horrible! But in a really compelling way.

A House of Endless Windows pulls off a similar trick: while this kinetic novel plays coy at first, dancing around details of backstory and context, it’s clear from the get-go that there’s something deeply wrong in this family – the alienated child (that’s our narrator), the pushy mother, the absent father – even before a new arrival shatters the prevailing chilly détente. But then the player understands more about what’s happened to create this situation, and engages with the mysteries surrounding the newly-arrived housekeeper, and the effect is slow-motion torture: the situation feels untenable, even as nothing overtly threatening is happening, the danger and trauma masked behind stilted dialogue and a refusal to acknowledge the reality that everybody knows lies beneath the surface.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a plot, stuff does happen, but the vibes are really what make A House of Endless Windows so arresting. You get a sense of the contortions the main character has made of his life in order to hedge defenses around himself almost immediately:

The sooner I complete the chores, the sooner I can start on homework. The sooner I start on homework, the more time I have to study.

Or:

I yell as loud as I can. It’s a pitiful, quiet yell.

The writing is finely calibrated, getting us in the head of Pierce, our damaged, precocious protagonist, while writing dialogue that isn’t quite naturalistic but still manages to feel plausible. Here’s an exchange between him and his friend Avery:

Pierce: Do you believe me?
Avery: Well, I can’t imagine you’re lying about it.
Pierce: That’s not the same as you believing me.
Avery: No. It isn’t.

It’s clear this awkwardness is intentional – there are a few flashbacks that take Pierce back to a time before things in his family were quite so broken, and his mother’s dialogue is notably warmer than it is in the present. There are also a few well-earned moments where the possibility of emotional engagement at least flickers into possibility, even if it’s never quite achieved. But they gain their power from the contrast they draw with the rest of the game, where Pierce is typically passive or frozen, observing that things aren’t right but unable to take action to correct them. Indeed, his lack of conviction is a major character point: he takes refuge in the rigidity of mathematical proofs, but finds he can’t even conjure enough faith to assume the axioms to be true – indeed, while contemplating the possibility of a higher power, he says he “prefer[s] this to the other options. And yet, it’s unsatisfying. I don’t like it. The proof, when I write it out, looks weak and flimsy.”

This is very internal horror, in other words, which is a good fit for the deliberate pace at which the plot doles out its revelations. For all that I think there was probably room for the climax to go a bit bigger and provide a sharper contrast with the slow-burn of the rest of the story, I found those middle bits, where Pierce knows more than you but not enough to be able to make sense of what’s happening, very effective. I’m no more eager to revisit A House of Endless Windows than I am that clip of a ghost walking down the hallway, but I think it’s going to stick with me just as long.

This is a visual novel with excellent background images and ambient music, and which has no interactions other than clicking 'next'.

The story pays careful attention to first and second person, with 'me' being a young child named Pierce and 'you' being a figure that grows more throughout the story.

This is a family drama, and deals with Pierce's loss of a family member in the past and with haunting visions.

Reviews can serve a few purposes, two of which are telling the author if they did a good job and giving others an idea of whether they'd enjoy the game or not. My general review system incorporates writing, emotional impact, and interactivity, among others. I believe the author intended this story to have its impact almost entirely through writing; many kinetic fiction authors use the size of paragraphs and new pages to give the 'next' button a more active feel, but this game felt to me to lack even that kind of interactivity, with fairly uniform page sizes.

So, I think the author succeeded in writing an excellent narrative, and I think they should be commended for succeeding in their desired text. I also think that many users are interested in interactive aspects of stories on IFDB, and so my overall rating of a 3 takes that into account.

I do wish I understood the game a bit better. I played Doki Doki Literature Club for the first time recently while researching visual novels; in it, the 'literary' character writes a poem about a ghost under a streetlamp that is flickering. Once you read it, she says something like, 'and of course you know it wasn't about a ghost, it was about a woman trapped in a situation'. And the protagonist is apologetic at not realizing that or understanding the metaphor, but it makes them feel more appreciative of the author and her poem. I feel the same way with this story; it's clear the story isn't really about what it contains, but I don't think I got the real message. What comes across strongest to me is the alienating feeling of being a young child with no family support and everyone you love feeling like they're drifting away, but that doesn't fit with the role of the housekeeper in the game, so I feel like I can't grasp at the 'center' of the story.