Your House review - "Brilliant use of interactive text-based puzzles, but might just get frustrating in the long run"

• What is Your House and is it really yours?
• Incredible execution of text-based puzzles
• Can get pretty frustrating after a while

A narrative-driven point-and-click adventure with a gorgeous art style and a convenient portrait mode - all these elements are exactly what I'm looking for when I want to dive into something quick and painless on mobile. 

Your House, for all its moody visuals and angsty monologuing, offers an enjoyable yet challenging experience, but is it worth trying to get to the bottom of this interactive mystery, or are you better off looking for your narrative fix elsewhere?

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Table of contents:

• Your House visuals
• Your House gameplay
• Your House verdict

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Your House Visuals

On paper, you might think that a text-based mystery won't have much to do with any kind of immersive imagery, but Your House masterfully combines its actual text with gorgeously designed artwork to offer bite-sized puzzles in every chapter. The distinct art style adds to the 1990s vibe here, with escape-room-esque brainteasers and an enigmatic past to discover as you tap your way through the titular house. 

As angsty teen Debbie, you'll literally run away from your problems at boarding school by exploring a mysterious house you suddenly have access to. It's no coincidence that someone sent you a set of keys for the place on your 18th birthday - and you'll spend the rest of the adventure trying to figure out the hows and whys of it all across this cryptic mansion.

The prequel to Unmemory also boasts a real-life counterpart - it's inspired by a Manhattan apartment designed by architect Eric Clough IRL, and when you couple that with the noir comic book aesthetics, it's hard not to want to explore every nook and cranny of the place just to get some answers. 

Who's that weird dude standing on the pavement like he's watching your every move? Why are there secret passageways under flights of stairs in the dark? And what exactly am I even looking for in the first place?

Your House Gameplay

That last question is what brings me to my biggest gripe with Your House - it's that more often than not, the frustration will come not from the puzzles themselves but from trying to figure out what you're even supposed to tap in the first place. Because there are no obvious means of pixel-hunting here - with the artwork and the seamlessly drawn images - it's hard to see which part of the image is actually interactive.

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Case in point - during the very beginning, I had to spend a good chunk of my time trying to find what I was supposed to do next, only to find out that the clips holding a certain poster on the wall could actually be tapped to remove the poster and reveal what's behind it. I mean, I can only do so much tapping on my screen before the urge to ragequit takes over me.

As you might expect from the genre, it's really all about pointing and clicking - or in this case, tapping - here, especially since most of the story is told through text. The words themselves reveal important clues to help you progress, and sometimes, you might even have to tap on an actual chapter icon to get to where you need to go.

While I absolutely adore how ingenious some of the presentations are - a space of text getting smaller and smaller as you scroll to the left to simulate squeezing through a cramped tunnel or trying to look for an item in a mess of words, for instance - a lot of the puzzles feel almost gimmicky at some point, which happens more often than I'd like.

What's the appeal?

Some of the puzzles are absolutely inspired, like taking some words literally rather than figuratively to unlock a message, or fumbling through the darkness and using Quick-Time Events in text form to escape certain events. But you'll also need to get your timing right for a few of the brainteasers, which isn't always the most intuitive thing. 

There's also the case of the fat-finger problem on mobile - in one instance, I had to tap and hold to follow an arbitrary word as it wriggled around on my screen, but because my finger was actually in the way, I couldn't for the life of me track the moving word properly without failing a bunch of times. There were quite a few sound-based puzzles too, which I couldn't play while on the go outside because I was playing on mute in public.

I suppose I should expect the same kind of style from Patrones & Escondites - they were, after all, responsible for Delete After Reading. I do wish there were more of the cool mindblowing puzzles rather than the gimmicky illogical ones - or perhaps I'm just not intuitive enough when it comes to these kinds of things.

Overall, Your House offers an incredibly interesting combination of genres that I honestly haven't seen elsewhere before, and with gorgeous aesthetics to boot. I'm not a huge fan of storytelling, and the solutions to some of the puzzles feel off, but if you're on the hunt for something fresh to spice up your run-of-the-mill narrative adventure, this might just do the trick.