A House of Endless Windows

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played : 7/15/25
Playtime: 30m

This is a visual novel that (Spoiler - click to show)headfakes a supernatural premise as a tool to cast fraught family dynamics (and possible mental health issues?) as horror. It occupies a similar space as Turn of the Screw, playing with audience expectations of supernatural stories to cast its protagonist (and family) in high relief. I found it pretty effective at this. That frisson of ‘is what’s going on what they SAY is going on?’ is a constant engagement to the reader, keeping the mind open and probing so that adjacent emotionality can get past any disbelief or detachment and get purchase. It is a very effective narrative tool, well employed here.

Over its runtime, it also does something interesting with its characters. The same suspicious dissonance that keeps us engaged, allows (most of) its characters to grow from initially painted one-dimensional extremes to more fully realized characters. Most especially the mother and sister. This is accomplished tangentially, as we internalize seemingly conflictory story beats that are well crafted to paint a picture in our heads without outright explaining things. The father character never really rises to that level, though this is not necessarily fatal, he is somewhat orthogonal to the story’s aims. The protagonist is slightly different, no less powerfully painted. Here the fact of interactivity is used to flesh out the character via the reader’s engagement rather than any imposed plot beats.

The multi-media presentation is very winning - abstract, pastel fog spaces over a moody soundtrack are excellent choices to reinforce the slippery, out of focus nature of the narrative. The text itself is attractively wrapped in a cool graphical box. It is timed text, but crucially plays out faster than we (ok, I) could read, meaning we get the “realtime conversation” vibe without slowing things down. The only off note I felt here was an early screen that seemed to be out of synch - a second, visually incompatible screen crowding up from the bottom. Later, such a graphical dividing line is used to good effect but early on it felt more like a bug than an artistic choice. The fact that this “bug” was not repeated suggests it might be deliberate, even if it didn’t read so.

There are a few further dissonances. Most notably, the narrative plays with POV. The protagonist, the character we are nominally aligned with as reader, is rendered in first person. We have full access to their inner life and to the extent we feel proactive, it is with this POV character. It is somewhat jarring then when a later character is referred to in second person, explicitly casting them as the reader! The first effect of this is to nicely reframe some prior text that felt applied to one character as another’s. The price we pay for that neat twist though is a weird space where we understand/empathize/and align with the “ME” of the narrative, not the “YOU.” In fact, notwithstanding that we are consistently called “you” by the narrative, it does not produce a dramatic tension within us or the story, it just kind of jars things. I have no doubt there was a purpose to this explicit choice, but whatever that might be was lost in the confusion.

My other main quibble is that the ending felt… arbitrary. It just kind of ended, resolving little of the tension of the work. To be fair, there is real resolution for one character as well as the ‘what really happened’ plot. Between the reader alignment confusion, and the fact that the narrative continued to power on for a bit after those climaxes, I was left feeling like the story outran its own aims. Instead of crescendoing with resolution of plot closure, it lingered on. The message here is unmistakable - there is no CONCLUSION, life continues past things like plot climaxes. True, but… isn’t the power of stories heavily tied to closure and climax? Even “nothing ever ends” is a meaningful ending, but it should be underlined in the reader’s head to land as actual ending. For me, my mindset was just a bit too muddled to get there.

All that said, I would still recommend this work - it does many things right, creates a wonderfully enigmatic vibe for much of its runtime, portrays some interestingly fraught family dynamics and has impactful revelations to dispense.