The House, by Miles Poehler
“The House is one of those games that lives or dies by vibes. While the setup calls to mind Maniac Mansion – you need to assemble a four-person team of stereotypes to explore and escape a spooky house – we’re actually in manic territory here. Those stereotypes aren’t ‘jock’, ‘nerd’, or ‘cheerleader,’ but ‘Lassie with a catnip habit’, ‘extra-dimensional time wizard’, or ‘Actually Dracula’, for one thing. And this straightforwardly-presented Twine game doesn’t involve any puzzle-solving – you just start out talking to each of the four characters in your party to get the first half of their backstories, then lawnmower through the rooms, each of which will prompt one character to infodump the other half of their pop-culture-reference-hammed background and then find a key. Once you bring all four keys to the attic, you win.
“The eight characters on offer are distinctive, but there aren’t many interactions between them – there’s like one short passage that varies based on who you’ve chosen as your main character, which also provides some customized narration, but each character is associated with a different room, and just spews out their spiel the same way every time, regardless of who’s listening. As a result the game supports two full playthroughs to see everyone’s plots, since almost all of the game’s text will be different if you choose the first four characters and then the last four, but after that diminishing returns set in pretty quickly.
“So with limited gameplay and a ten-minute or so runtime, as I said The House’s success really comes down to vibes, and the good news here is that while there’s a range in how well the game’s lolrandom humor landed for me, there are definitely some strong points. Some of the characters are a bit humdrum – that time wizard was kind of a dud – but I loved the Terminator pastiche, who per the movie is a robot who’s been sent back in time to assassinate the future leader of the human resistance, but has somehow adopted the identity, mannerisms, and accents of a Brooklyn cabbie from the 60s, and whose story winds up going even farther afield from those already-zany beginnings to involve babies, lava, and moral dilemmas. Similarly, I laughed at the fact that the alien-pretending-to-be-a-human’s cover story is instantly unbelievable, not because of the way it keeps accidentally mentioned being birthed in an extrasolar hatchery, but because it says it was raised in a middle-income household, when per the game ‘there hasn’t been a middle income since 1971’ (I’d date it later, to the oil shock, but that’s a nitpick).
“Sure, many of the pop-culture references seem unnecessary, and as I said, the characters are hit and miss. But the ratio is solid enough, and the time commitment low enough, that The House more than justifies its existence.”
So.
That’s the review I’d prefer to have written about The House. But we need to talk about Jessica.
In that roster of eight characters, only two are female, and actually one of them is a male-coded extradimensional demon bound into a doll, so that just leaves Jessica. Here’s her blurb on the character-select screen:
Jessica is an aspiring writer who could never really get off the ground after college. She is a little plain and no one would call her unattractive, but her only serious relationship recently ended in a bad way. Now she is thirty-something, living with her parents again, and left asking herself: “Is it too late for love?”
Her internal narration is presented in a flowery script, she’s a big fan of romance novels, her dialogue is broken up by stammers and stutters to convey her low self-esteem, and her “relationship” ended because she wanted a baby and her commitment-phobe partner-only-by-a-technicality immediately dumped her when he found out. What’s worse, while the jokes for most of the other characters are designed to make you laugh at what they say, many of Jessica’s invite you to laugh at what a pathetic girl she is, like this bit of dialogue: “I-I love this house, don’t you? I can… imagine me cleaning it for you.”
“Lady with romance-addled brain” isn’t necessarily a terrible idea for a comedy character, let me say, and there are some gags that gesture towards how this could have actually worked: I giggled at the absurdity of a description that said “Mirrors line the walls, like in a romance drama set in a hardware store.” But again, she’s the only female character, the majority of the jokes are unfunny and at her expense, and nothing kills the good-natured buzz of a silly comedy game like lazy stereotypes. I wish I didn’t have to write this addendum, because most of the game is an inoffensive fun time with occasional moments of inspired wackiness – so here we are.