Welcome Time Wasters!
This week I sat down at my computer and played a game simply titled, The House. From what I gathered, this is the first game made by this developer. I’ve got to say that for a first attempt at making a game, The House is pretty good.
Players control what I think is a person (we’ll get to that that when I talk about graphics) who has to explore a house to solve a mystery. Players move the character on a grid system, which is a little different for a point-and-click adventure game, but it works. There isn’t really an end goal, but there is a creepy darkness that sometimes pops-up to scare the living crap out of anyone that is foolish enough to sit really close to the screen with headphones on.
Players progress through the house by solving puzzles to unlock new areas (At one point I had to dive into a small aquarium to tell my fish about the great view from my window). The puzzles are fairly simple, though there are a few screwballs thrown into the mix. One puzzle near the end of the game annoyed me beyond all belief, and while I hate to admit it, Alia had to solve the puzzle for me (I’m disappointed in myself). Another puzzle requires player to move the camera around to solve, this one took me a minute to figure out, but was fairly simple once I understood what to do.
One of the major problems I have with The House is how short it is. Even with getting stuck on that one end-game puzzle, it still only took me about an hour to complete the game. I’d like to see the developer create a game similar to this that would clock in closer to the two or three hour mark.
Graphics in The House are a little strange. The game is filled with brightly colored environments, but the audio and story of the game makes it feel like it’s suppose to be part of the horror genre. The main character looks like it’s suppose to be a human, but it has a weird design. The character is completely white, has long pointy limbs and is missing a face. The graphics never got in the way of the gameplay, but I can’t honestly say that they enhance it in any way.
Audio in the game is in the same vein as the graphics. Minus the few great moments that it is utilized for a jump, it really doesn’t stick out.
I liked The House, but it was a short adventure. The game could do to be expanded with some more exploration and puzzles. The graphics were weird and really didn’t fit the creepy story that the game seemed like it was going for. Audio was kind of just there. The couple jump scares that the audio is used for are good, but besides that it just falls away from the rest of the game. Being that it’s the developer’s first attempt at making a game, it isn’t bad. I’ll be interested to see what the developer of The House, arturkot, does in the future.
The House gets 2.5 GiN Gems out of 5 for a solid attempt from a developer at their first game.