Demo unlocks first rooms of The House Dreams Along With Them

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Full version of surreal first-person puzzler coming to Steam for Windows PC in 2026

It's debatable how much our dreams really represent wish fulfillment, as Freud hypothesized, but there's no questioning the direct correlation between the subconscious and conscious reality in The House Dreams Along With Them, a surreal upcoming adventure by indie developer Jeffrey Nordin.

The game takes place "on the night the moon fell," in a "mysterious house in the woods that contains empty rooms you can dream in." (Fortunately, no one lives there.) The dream version of the house is similar in layout yet different from its real-world counterpart, and you'll need to successfully alternate between them in order to progress. At first the available rooms are limited and without power, but within each dream is a "cryptic puzzle that, once solved, makes the dream version of the room real in the house," along with its associated changes. As "more rooms are solved, the house becomes more complete but also stranger as more things than expected are made real." With each dream you finish, the closer you'll get to the "enigmatic reification of night."

If your head is already spinning from the concept, that's about right. Described by the developer as being "similar to Blue Prince if it had more existential horror and less RNG (Random Number Generation)," The House Dreams Along With Them is designed to continually challenge perception, tasking players to "think logically, abstractly, and meta-narratively" to succeed. Mechanically it's more traditional, presented in first-person, free-roaming 3D with an emphasis on interactivity as you "pick up, tap, click, throw, twist, tinker, and intuit puzzle solutions." You can crawl and jump and will need to do so, but this game relies not on quick reflexes but on an "inquisitive mind" to progress – and probably a notepad, though the insights you uncover are all recorded in-game as Observations, Intuitions, and Knowledge. Whenever you wish to awaken from a dream, there's no need to pinch yourself, as the game's simple hyperventilation feature will rouse you instead. 

The full game isn't due out until sometime in 2026, but a substantial demo of The House Dreams Along With Them is available now on Steam, providing players with the first three main puzzle rooms that could collectively take several hours to solve.