Go to the game's main page
Review
Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.
…and learn profound inner social truths. The game directly starts with the most important choices (really, the only substantial choices) at the beginning - deciding your viewpoint character and the rest of the party. Then you go explore a room, get a backstory reveal from one of your companions, repeat until you’ve learned about everyone (including yourself), (Spoiler - click to show)get your Puppy of Friendship, and end the game. The number of available characters, eight, is perfectly suited for a second playthrough with the characters you didn’t pick the first time.
Each character has their inner monologue written in a different font and color (Some can be a little hard to read). One thing The House does well is make them all have a unique voice, if a bit too reliant on humor and pop culture references. Zany referential humor isn’t quite my personal taste, so a lot of the stories left me cold, though there I did like the two that stepped into darker territory.
I did find it kind of weird that apparently guys can run a whole spectrum from space aliens to weird robots but girls can only be a mundane romance writer or a literal dog (the doll doesn’t count). Certainly that’s not an automatic red flag, there’s a lot of good stuff with a “mundane girl meets the otherworldly” premise and an ordinary person can have great character development. However, I never got the sense if Jessica (the writer) was a character we were meant to root for - I also felt this confusion with some of the other characters like the comedy duo or the doll, but not nearly to this extent - or go “hah, look at that unmarried girl and her silly notions, now let’s go back to our fantasies of cool wizards and vampires.” I wasn’t fond of this move.
Without the above considerations, I would feel comfortable saying that The House is a cool proof-of-concept for a larger work. Along with tightening up the writing, adding some puzzles or really taking advantage of the “let’s put a bunch of characters from wildly different genres together” premise by adding whole party interactions (since it’s mostly your chosen main character listening to the others monologue) could be done to expand the foundation.
