You know how people who enjoy escape rooms are extremely annoying? Well, I write escape rooms as a hobby. Imagine how annoying I must be. It’s because of this annoying interest that I was drawn to Your House (the game, not the literal building), which sees you arrive at a strange home and work through a string of puzzles to plunge deeper into its mystery.
Mechanically, Your House lives up to this premise – you never go more than about 30 seconds without encountering another riddle or conundrum blocking your progression. Narratively though, it never feels like you have much reason to do things other than because the game asks you to do them. Many of the escape rooms I’ve played function the same way – plot is merely a loose backdrop to activity. But in a video game, you notice it a little more, especially with Your House’s odd exploration system that only fits one version of the game.
Your House’s Puzzles Are Creative, But Not Robust
But before we get to that, the main draw here is the puzzles. Few felt like rehashes of the same basic brain teasers similar games or escape rooms throw at you, yet most were instantly understandable, if not easily solvable. That’s a fine line to walk, and Your House manages it. However, the solutions are often so simple in execution that you can accidentally brute force a lot of them, taking away the sense of achievement or challenge.
For example, one puzzle required you to push a red button seven times in a row to open a secret compartment. The construction of this puzzle was pretty good – you had to find, by solving other puzzles, a magazine and a sheet of paper with squares cut out. You then, via another puzzle, had to figure out what page to overlay the paper on, and how to rotate it. This gave you the answer ‘Red X 7’ and the logo on the button.
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But as I went back to the button, a single extra push opened it. In clicking around, looking for a hint (as one does in an escape room), I had already pushed it six times. Just one more click of desperation and I would have solved it without solving it, skipping several puzzles along the way. Another time there were numbers by the side of the portrait, and I realised the numbers rose each time I pushed a button. I clicked them both in turn, trying to reset them to 0 so I could get back to actually solving the puzzle, and it turned out the answer was 5-6, so I skipped it completely.
While there are clever uses of the environment, from jars on shelves corresponding to teeth on keys, to UV light secrets, to a variety of keycode and padlock clues that are always different, everything feels a little rigid. Puzzles get harder as you progress, but the clue is always from the last item you picked up, with little lateral thinking required to piece everything together. Though they offer a satisfying progression, the puzzles aren’t quite enough to sustain intrigue, and nothing else in the game pulls its weight.
Your House Is Best On Mobile, And Only Mobile
Available on PC and mobile, the game doesn’t suit this split. Well suited to mobile (I tested this version briefly), the tactile nature of clicking through puzzles and letters – which the game uses in place of a narrator – makes it feel at home at your fingertips. On PC though, it feels a little too slow, and the additional screen space the desktop version offers is wasted, home only to generic patterns.
Since there’s no control scheme as such, you instead read these letters to explore. Some are literal postage letters, but most are just text boxes that look that way aesthetically. Some words are bolded, and clicking these words either tells you more of what your character is feeling, or correspond to an action. Click the word ‘nervous’ and you get a description of what sights make her feel this way. Click the word ‘door’ and you open it.
Unfortunately, this makes for a lot of scurrying back and forth. There’s no map and getting from place to place in the relatively small house takes longer than it should. A couple of times I knew where the thing I needed for a puzzle was – be it a safe, a radio, a locker et cetera – but had to scroll through a few different rooms just to get there.
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.
- Released
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March 27, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Patrones & Escondites
- Publisher(s)
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Patrones & Escondites
- Solid set of puzzles
- Well paced difficulty progression
- Interesting art style
- Only suits mobile play
- Weak story
- Puzzles too easy to break