The House
Miles Poehler
This game has a lot of energy and flash. It had the feeling for me of a game where the author had a bunch of ideas, and felt the need to get them all written out quickly before they slipped away. As a result, the final product has a bunch of typos and a serious lack of coherence, but that was never the point–the point was to have someone tell you, “Hey, you know what would be cool?” and then tell you a short story, and then two seconds later tell you, “Hey, you know what else would be cool?” and tell you a completely different short story. And they are, indeed, cool ideas! Some of them landed for me better than others, simply due to my personal preferences in story make-up (I’m not super into epic tragedy/angst, both of which are key points of a couple of the stories) but none overstay their welcome.
I appreciated the fact that there were eight total characters of which you got to pick four for any given playthrough, meaning you could get the basics from exactly two playthroughs. But there was extra material for even more playthroughs, so if you really were taken with one of the characters, you could go back and enjoy a bit more of their interactions with each other. But at the same time, I didn’t feel anything was lost by not going back for that? I appreciated that bit of game design, as well.
Did the author have anything to say? “Hey, guess what?”
Did I have something to do? This is probably the weakest part of the design–there was literally no meaningful choice ever in the entire game, other than ‘which story do you want to hear?’