A House of Endless Windows

A House of Endless Windows by SkyShard is a moody, claustrophobic game about a child trying to understand a family secret. Its soundtrack is evocative without being intrusive, and it is beautifully designed, with clean lines over abstract backgrounds that feel pensive and restless. Sometimes the backgrounds resemble the marbled endpapers of a book; sometimes they evoke 19th-century photographic processes (another kind of glass window), with images in various states of emergence and obfuscation, like spirit photography. This game’s vibes are definitely strong.

The story is told in first person, from the perspective of 12-year-old Pierce Windrow. In addition to managing their studies and social life, Pierce is coping with their mother’s depression, their father’s absence, and, most centrally, the death or disappearance of their sister Jane. There is a stiffness to the language that very effectively mirrors the tension the characters feel around each other, and the walls they have built to protect themselves. For instance, Pierce praises their mother this way: “I appreciate her thoroughness,” and they describe returning home from school this way: “I set my backpack against the leftmost wall of my room…” In fact, the narration is so analytical and unemotional that I initially thought that either Pierce was a robot, or that (Spoiler - click to show)their dead sister had been returned to the family as a robot. The game builds on that strangeness in the way that it employs architecture as a metaphor for deception, isolation, and convoluted thinking: “Every hall has no end. Every window is just your reflection for someone else to see,” Pierce says. This is a house that’s dark even during the day, where all the windows are shut tight, and each room has secrets.

When Jane (Spoiler - click to show)returns home six years after her disappearance, the parents try to convince Pierce that she is a live-in housekeeper named Ms. Stirling. She mostly stays indoors, bringing soup and tea to the mom’s bedroom. She avoids church, and when she does go outside, she wears a veil over her face, “for the mosquitoes.” I found this detail so strange, dreamy, and chilling. What’s most chilling, of course, is the parents’ lie. I mean, convincing their child that their dead sister is now the family housekeeper? This is some truly next-level gaslighting! And this is the part that sort of rang a little hollow for me. A teenager having a tough time at home and going to live with a relative for a while does not seem like a super uncommon scenario. Faking the sister’s death and maintaining that lie for six years feels totally out of proportion as a response.

Then again, our understanding is limited by Pierce’s perception, and Pierce is an unreliable narrator. For instance, they try to comprehend the distance between Earth and Saturn this way: “I know very little about engineering, but the space between here and Saturn is almost impossibly large. I could not walk or run or drive that distance in a lifetime.” On the one hand, it makes sense to conceptualize this distance in terms they understand, and it’s technically true that they could never walk or run or drive that distance in a lifetime. But the units feel so fundamentally ill-suited to the distance being described. For me, this encapsulates the way Pierce, with their child’s logic and frame of reference, tries to make sense of the family’s huge, adult-sized secrets.

Several reviewers have commented on the lack of choices in this game, but to be honest, I didn’t even notice. The game so effectively created an atmosphere of confusion and confinement that I guess I wasn’t expecting to have any choices!