YOUR HOUSE

Your House is an interactive text adventure that manages to mix intelligent puzzles to a narrative that stays engaging from start to finish. Even with a relatively short duration — approximately 10 hours (or even less if you don't get stuck in some puzzles like I did) —, there's plenty for those who like an excellent mystery story in which nothing is what it seems — not even your own house, that is, if it really is yours.

The puzzles may be obtuse at times, and even the help that we do get might not be what we expect. However, that makes everything more true to life. Many times, I felt like I was Debbie in her predicament, getting frustrated over a puzzle I was close to solving. Despite that, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Your House and Debbie will stick with me for a long time.

Despite a bit of clunky translation and its rather brief runtime, Your House feels like it could be the beginning of something great. Whereas many puzzle-heavy games are quick to give extra clues when it’s clear that the player is struggling, this title asks more. It makes you slow down, and each time something finally clicks, the dopamine rush is more than worth the effort. If the team at Patrones & Escondites end up creating more incredibly satisfying mystery games in this same style, it would be hard not to buy them on launch day.

With Your House, Patrones & Escondites return to their unique style of interactive storytelling with a prequel to Unmemory, offering another intriguing combination of book-style text and visuals in a thoughtful tale of drama and mystery.

Your House is a glorious mashup of video game and book, taking interesting elements from both storytelling methods to create an engaging game.

Your House is a short game, clocking in at about three hours to beat it all in one go, and with five clearly separated chapters if you want to play in small bursts, but because of that, you notice the time to take walking back and forth in tunnels, not being able to take the turns you want to take but having to guess or remember the entire layout and each room's name. This, combined with puzzles that seem to solve themselves and the strained narrative, drag down any enjoyment the individual problem solving might have granted. Your House is a good facsimile of an escape room, but the flaws only become more apparent in the digital realm.

Patrones & Escondites' Your House stumbles in the most important thing, the puzzles. You are too often left feeling frustrated when you spend too much time on a particular puzzle. However, as a concept, it is interesting and in some ways also unique, which is supported by the clever audiovisual design.