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Review
This is a haunting story with gorgeous visuals and a lovely, unobtrusive soundtrack. It opens with a pair of mysterious, compelling lines and then shifts into a slice-of-life scene of the young teen narrator, Pierce, having a typical interaction with his mother—which serves to immediately characterize both of them and sketch a picture of their relationship. Brief statements from Piece, who often speaks of logic and uses mathematical analogies, his voice tending toward mechanical and detached, illustrate what it’s like to live in this house, with these parents:
"I set my backpack against the leftmost wall of my room and check the note [from his mother] on my desk. On our better days, this note makes up most of our communication."
"Father has already taken his seat at the chair opposite mine. I don't usually see him for dinner."
The initial backdrop for the text is an abstract digital illustration done in soft pastels, but the visuals shift as the narrative progresses—becoming louder, darker, the colors less harmonious. Pierce doesn’t understand just how wrong things are here, from his limited, inexperienced perspective, but readers will start to pick up on it, and the horror is only amplified by the gap between his knowledge and ours.
His neighbor and peer Avery makes for a good contrast, more worldly, picking up on things Pierce has missed, pointing Pierce toward truths he's failed to see. While the story never becomes genre horror, the vibes remain: a refusal to confront or acknowledge grief or to address underlying issues; children scrutinized and molded without commensurate care or love—these are all their own horrors, and Pierce does realize that on some level:
"It feels like every wall is a window with something on the other side looking in, looking at me."
"I don't think I could take him into this house, even if he wanted to give it a try."
"This house is not your home, no matter what everyone around tells you. Every hall has no end. Every window is just your reflection for someone else to see."
The use of second person here is a subversion of the typical IF “you”; the reader is not an agent in the story, the character we inhabit not playable at all. Pierce is addressing his lost sister, who has already made her choices. I won’t spoil this plotline at all, but it's the central throughline of the piece, and its resolution both cements the horror and also leads to hints of hope. At the end, the visuals resume the same colors they started with, soft and gentle again. The long-unacknowledged truth has been revealed, and maybe that means that for Pierce, the horror won’t continue indefinitely.
(One note to hopefully prevent future players from flailing with this as I did: if you visit any of the menu options, the way to return to the story is to right-click!)
