Your House getting close, with a whole lot of Pineapple inbound

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Text-driven mystery prequel and comic revenge adventure unveiled by the creators of Unmemory

Indie developer Patrones & Escondites has been blurring the lines between novels and games since their 2020 debut, Unmemory. Now the two-person indie Spanish developer plans to push those boundaries once again with a prequel called Your House... but they may just serve up a heaping side dish of revenge first. 

Loosely based on the true story of a deluxe apartment on Fifth Avenue designed by architect Eric Clough with secretly embedded riddles and puzzles, the titular house in this game is not just a house, but "a puzzle that houses the story of two women: a lost teenager on her quest for answers, and a wise woman struggling against social and cultural conventions." It's the player's task to unravel the secret shared by the two protagonists, not through normal investigative means, but by interacting with the house itself as a "narrative vehicle/game mechanic." The house sees all, and like a "personal diary" containing other people's stories, it is waiting to be unlocked and the mystery revealed. For that to happen, you will need to explore the rooms of the house, make key choices and solve a variety of challenges along the way. If successful, you'll find that the two women's stories "intersect in a surprising ending that will give meaning to their lives." 

Like Unmemory, and to a lesser extent 2023's unrelated Delete After Reading, Your House is designed to be "a game you can read, a book you can play," in this case telling a tale of "the price of pursuing your dreams." The story is presented largely through text, but it's interspersed with graphics in a "noir comic visual style," along with seamlessly integrated puzzles that must be solved to progress. During the course of the game's five chapters, projected to take about six hours to complete, the experience will at times be "comparable to an escape room," except here the goal is "not as much about finding a way out, but rather uncovering the lives of the characters and their history."

Your House is available for wishlisting on Steam and "coming soon" for Windows and Mac, as well as mobile devices. However, the race is on to see whether this game arrives first or another project by the same developers, the comedically quirky Pineapple: A Bittersweet Revenge, about a girl who's finally had enough of the school bully and sets out to pull pineapple-based pranks until she gets even. 

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