The House Review

Developer - EdoartGames, Publisher - Res SRL

The House is a new first-person horror and psychological game for the computer. Escape the house where it all began, collect items, weapons and level up. 

Travel between worlds and time to reach your goal. 

Go discover the dark secrets of the House where it all began!

Like many other titles with the same name, The House is a horror-themed action-adventure FPS focusing mainly on ambience, zombies and many puzzles with bugs that will make you want to vomit.

Set your sights on traversing a seemingly abandoned home, using only the tools you find at your disposal.

Gameplay

Not a lot can be said about the gameplay, most of the time I was stuck in a bug, but from what I could play, is that there isn't a tutorial, so be sure to press TAB for your inventory to find your hotkey for a light source!

The game is dark, or at least it can be dark if you have your monitor settings incorrect (oopsie!)

Besides the darkness of the game, The House does offer a quest line to help you navigate without giving you obvious hints, some of the puzzles aren't so easily solvable like placing picture frames in the correct order.

From everything that I played, there are at least a couple of good jump scares available, out of all of them put together only 2 managed to make me have slight goosebumps.

The House offers you puzzles that you must solve to progress a stage, these puzzles are easy enough to figure out without pressuring them too much for the player.

There is also a chase scene where you must dodge the crates and avoid receiving the famous game over title screen.

I briefly touched on the puzzles, these range from safe cracking, picture placements, and easy enough exploration puzzles to look for items around the room.

These items include health items like bandages and syringes, you can even mix items to craft healing items, and you can find ammo for your gun and the Axe that you will automatically find by story progression

Traversing the map is also a puzzle, as you travel in a locker to "Time Travel" to different realities.

Want to know something interesting? You could take a sip of tea that magically appears out of nowhere, at least it's cosy with a fireplace!

The House features a mass amount of bugs that will surely rock your world and will make you want to play the game.

• Falling through the map from loading a save, 

• Defeating the boss in level 1 then viewing the cutscene to die by the zombies that spawned beforehand, 

• Getting stuck in animation from chairs and certain lockers,

• Certain cutscenes not activating correctly,

• Getting softlocked in the puzzle that you must match a drawing too.

• Duplication of weapons with ammo. There is a chance that you can't drop duplicated guns to clear inventory.

These were only the ones that I found, there are probably a whole lot more.

Final Thoughts

Supposedly, there are 5 hours worth of gaming here, but you will only make it an hour, as I did. There's also an upcoming multiplayer zombie mode coming sometime in December 2023.

I was surprised at how well the game looked, as well as the audio cues, it is a big shame that the game has so many issues with the bugs outlined above. Thankfully, according to Steam pages, there will be monthly updates, but we'll see if they hold up their end of that.

I would not recommend purchasing this game until the bugs have been flattened. It's a mystery why EdoartsGames made a new mode without fixing the previous bugs first.

Rating

I would rate it a 2.

Despite the bugs, the game does offer great visuals, sounds and puzzle design with an intricate flow of gameplay, I just wished I could have played without getting softlocked constantly.

(5 being the absolute best)

Links

Steam