YOUR HOUSE Review – IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR STREET

A house gifted to you, filled with clothes your size and has a key with your name on it. But you feel more like the house owns you than you own it, and you’re quite certain that you’re being watched…

On her 18th birthday, no one wishes Debbie a ‘happy birthday’, not even her abusive father. One person has remembered though, and that is the stranger who sends her a mysterious postcard with an address written on it, accompanied by a key with her name on it. After Debbie then finds out that her best friend is sleeping with her boyfriend and she’s also kicked out of boarding school, she decides she’s had enough of her life and seeks out the address written on the postcard. What she finds is a beautiful, old house that has seemingly been fitted out for her with its wardrobes filled with clothes that are her size. As Debbie settles into her new home, she starts to realise that the house is designed to be one large puzzle, leading her to the truth of who sent her its key.

PATRONES & ESCONDITES’ YOUR HOUSE is a text-based narrative puzzle game set in the 1990s and is a prequel to its debut game, UNMEMORY. While I’ve played text-based games before that take the extra step from visual novel to a straight up interactive digitized novel, YOUR HOUSE still feels unique in how the player interacts with it. The story is laid out like any digitized novel, however the player is able to interact with the writing and illustrations to progress and solve puzzles. The game is constantly finding new ways for the player to interact with the story, thus keeping things interesting. Sometimes we’re able to travel around by clicking on rooms that are in bold or similarly performing actions by clicking on verbs or items that are in bold, other times we can interact with one of the illustrations, often of rooms or items. There were even a few cases where the text would move around the screen and I had to click certain words during a timed event. YOUR HOUSE does everything to make the game actually feel like a game rather than just a digitized novel, despite its presentation.

The puzzles are well thought out and interesting, plenty of them had me scratching my head and thinking outside of the box. All of the answers felt viable and even if I had resorted to the hints section for clues, the answers were always something that I could have eventually worked out myself if I had given it more thought. The hint section operates in the best way by progressively giving you more breadcrumbs so that you have every chance to still work the puzzle out for yourself while being pointed in the right direction. My only criticism of the hint section was that I felt that sometimes the hints weren’t enough to help me solve the puzzle and a few of them were really oddly phrased so ended up confusing me further. Sometimes they would also allude to items or information that I hadn’t yet found. 

Spread across five chapters, YOUR HOUSE’s story remains engaging throughout. It portray’s Debbie’s excitement and anxiety over the home really well as she’s both ecstatic at this opportunity to start a new life and also paranoid that something is amiss about the whole situation, unable to feel wholly comfortable despite receiving an invitation to stay. The home itself is a mystery, with its puzzle slowly unveiling to Debbie the story of its true owner. In fact, YOUR HOUSE is based on a real life apartment designed by architect Eric Clough for Wallstreet financial experts, Maureen Sherry and Steven Klinsky, who wanted to surprise their children with a “scavenger hunt”. Much like the house Debbie is invited to in YOUR HOUSE, Clough designed the rooms of the apartment to contain elaborate puzzles ranging from ciphers to hidden compartments.

YOUR HOUSE uses a noir comic visual style as its art style and this fits the game perfectly. Not only does this suit the mystery themes really well, but it also keeps the pages of the novel looking vibrant and visually pleasing, helping to break up the amount of text we are reading with gorgeous illustrations or animated cutscenes.

The music is mostly ambient though does swell into some more emotional tunes during pivotal moments. For the most part though, it is simply relaxing to have on in the background as we read and it meets the absolutely vital requirement of not sounding too repetitive or distracting while we’re trying to concentrate on reading or puzzles.

I thoroughly enjoyed YOUR HOUSE. It took a little over three hours to complete but I thought this was a perfect length for this type of game as it didn’t outstay its welcome. While I found the story’s twist to be a little predictable, the storyline otherwise kept me engaged enough to want to solve the puzzles to find out more about the house’s history and its owner. It’s built on a fascinating premise and uses really creative techniques to make its gameplay as interactive as possible despite mostly consisting of text. I’m thoroughly impressed with how PATRONES & ESCONDITES has handled this unique style of gameplay.

Jess played YOUR HOUSE on PC with a provided review copy.