The House Before Review – A Body Horror You Can’t Move House From

The House Before taps into a lot of the weird things I like. The stuff I seldom talk about to others – including my wife- for fear that I’ll be locked up. I mean, if you consider Existenz one of the greatest films of the 90s, a fan of Lovecraftian games, and think that dirty, gritty 1-bit visuals are lush, not many people will agree with you.

So, visually and thematically, Gabriel Heffenstein’s ‘game’ is fascinating. There’s no point reinventing the prose: You wake up as a house. Your bones are pipes and tunnels. Your organs are a labyrinth of caves. I suggest you read the rest on the Steam store page, but yes, this is the best way to describe the concept.

Because you can even process the ideas behind The House Before, you’re plunged into your awakening as a house, organ by organ. I typically start my review games on one of my retro handhelds if I can get away with it, but I started with a mouse and keyboard on my tablet. The mouse wasn’t needed, as you can play this entirely with the former.

Becoming A House One Organ At A Time

It’s portrayed from a first-person perspective as you become reacquainted with your body, piece by piece, scrolling through the commands and options with the directional keys, pressing the spacebar to select. Initially, you’re reborn and learning about your senses and… feelings, and that’s when you’re introduced to your eye and then paraded around on a track.

Yes, The House Before is literally on rails as you move around, meeting different organs and agents that can cause conflict. Your path is essentially written, and this game is not challenging in terms of skill, but the themes might be a little hard to understand based on how surreal it is, and it is very much a body horror experience.

One early example where you’re literally blasting away trauma/decayed memories from your lungs is surprisingly profound, as are the interactions with various representations and the text. As indicated, the themes and aesthetics really appealed to me with a gutsy presence, though there was quite a mismatch of design choices, too.

The House Before is abstract in so many ways, and that’s a huge appeal. I love the ambiguity and opportunities for skewed interpretations, but there are times when creating organs such as a scrotum just took away some of its power. For someone invested in deep, meaningful concepts, I also laugh out loud at anything resembling the sound of a fart or a reference to a ballsack. This cheapened it a little.

When The Aesthetics Collide

This also applied to the visuals. We begin with grainy, noisy artefacts with limited colour, which gave a sense of Darkseed meets 7th Guest, meets Edgar Allan Poe’s Interactive Horror. Then, all of a sudden, the 3D art switched to bright neon representations that look like they’re straight off the public domain music disks I used to consume on the Amiga.

Perhaps that’s what flipped things for me – the gritty, guerrilla nostalgia of indie artistry, because when I first saw these objects, they looked like they were from different games. Maybe there’s a story to this, but nevertheless, it does work, and I learned to appreciate the inconsistencies, though I definitely preferred the starting ambience.

More so as a game, The House Before is quite restrictive and closer to an observation than interaction. That isn’t a negative, but that will put some off, and the developer has made it clear that this isn’t that type of game. It does border on visual novel territory at times, but is also a very unique experience that I haven’t quite experienced before.

Definitely an acquired taste and challenging to recommend to the masses. I know I like it, and I’m keen to see what Gabriel does next.