Your House Hides A Tangled Mystery In A Familiar Place
An inventive new puzzle game hits close to home.
Debbie is having a terrible birthday. She’s been betrayed by her boyfriend and best friend, expelled from school, and hit by a car. But before the day is over, she receives an envelope with a key and a mysterious address, setting her on an unexpected, puzzling journey.
Your House is an interactive fiction puzzle game from Spanish developer Patrones & Escondites, following Debbie’s attempts to discover the mystery of a house she seems to have inherited. After arriving at the address she was directed to earlier, Debbie finds a house packed full of artifacts from its owner’s life, but with no sign of anyone living there. After a few days, a scrapbook shows up on her new doorstep, providing the first clues to a mystery that unravels across the rest of the roughly three-hour game.
In some ways, Your House feels reminiscent of 2024’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, despite their very different approaches. Both games focus on solving a series of puzzles set in a single, sprawling house, and in both, the central mystery ends up illuminating the lives of multiple characters still struggling with events that occurred years before the game actually takes place. Where they diverge is in vast differences in their style and gameplay.
Your House plays out like you’re reading an adventure gamebook, its puzzles presented and solved through text and mostly static images. Its comic-inspired art brings to life the clutter of Debbie’s new home in a way that feels whimsical and a bit sinister at the same time. As much as I looked forward to each new puzzle that appeared as I worked my way through the game, I was equally excited just to see more gorgeous illustrations of the house itself.
Your House turns a linear storybook into a tangled mystery.
The game’s story is for the most part rigidly linear, with one puzzle at a time being presented and leading directly into the next, which works well for its text-driven presentation. You progress through the story by clicking highlighted words in the text, which can move Debbie to another room, open your inventory where you can examine anything you’ve collected, or give you a closer look at a specific object in the house. Because you need to find the right words in the text to navigate, it makes sense to keep puzzles focused on just a handful of rooms or clues at a time to keep players from having to flip through multiple pages of text just to get past an obstacle that’s right in front of them.
That text-based approach may seem limiting, but Your House has some clever tricks to keep its puzzles feeling fresh. At one point in the game, you find a pair of night-vision goggles, and turning them on will reveal hidden words on the pages of the story or secrets drawn into its images. While its art resembles static comic panels, the images depicted there can often be moved or manipulated in surprising ways, and punching in secret codes to computer terminals and padlocks is a big part of the gameplay.
Gorgeous comic-inspired art illustrates the puzzles of Your House.
As Your House goes on, it reveals itself to be more than a simple series of escape room puzzles. Debbie was brought here for a reason, and the labyrinthine house itself serves a purpose for its creators that only slowly becomes apparent as you delve further into its depths. It may not have the most gripping story I’ve ever played through, but the way Your House’s real meaning begins to bubble up through what first seem to be disconnected puzzles is surprisingly satisfying.
The most impressive part of Your House is how it’s able to weave increasingly complex puzzles out of its simple point-and-click mechanics. It’s the kind of puzzle game that relies less on eureka moments or precise logical deduction than on looking carefully at the tools you have in front of you and seeing how they might fit together into a solution. The game’s condensed scope means nothing should leave you stumped for more than a few minutes at a time, but when the solutions do reveal themselves, like a Magic Eye picture coming together once you focus deeply enough, it’s almost always thrilling. Your House blending its old-school format with inventive mechanics makes it one of the most exciting puzzle games so far this year — not to mention the most stylish.
