Adventures filled with puzzles have become very popular lately. We only need to recall the game Blue Prince, which won a handful of awards and demonstrated how skillfully puzzles can be used to build a story. There are also Call of The Sea and Call of The Elder Gods, which I also played this year and which managed to captivate me with their puzzles, atmosphere, and story.
The House That Dreams Along With Them, just like the titles mentioned above, is a first-person puzzle adventure that draws us into a strange, mysterious world from the very beginning. At the very start, a sentence appears on the screen saying that it all began on the day the Moon fell. We find ourselves in complete darkness while above us is a huge purple, spherical creature that seems almost alive. The presence of this seemingly purple moon is unsettling, but at the same time, it also piques the player’s curiosity, as it appears to be connected to the house from our dreams.
We soon find that same house in the middle of a forest, surrounded by tall trees, where the silence creates the feeling of being outside of time and space once again. The house appears isolated, almost forgotten, as if it has been waiting for years to be rediscovered.
Inside, we find several destroyed pieces of furniture and objects scattered throughout the rooms. However, each of them hides something unusual, and that is the ability to get comfortable, close our eyes, take a deep breath, exhale, and… suddenly find ourselves in a completely different place. We are still in the same house, but this time in its dream version.
Each room has its own furniture, details, atmosphere, and a special song on the radio, but also a puzzle that needs to be solved to find the exit. What I particularly liked was the way the puzzle solving is reflected in the outside world. When you successfully overcome the challenge and leave the dream room, its “real world” counterpart takes on a completely new look. The destroyed furniture disappears, the room regains its former shape, as if we’ve just managed to bring a small part of the house back to life. In this way, the game doesn’t just reward us with passage to the next room, but also allows us to watch as the entire house gradually changes with our progress.
Riddles That Change the Face of Reality
This game comes to us from a solo developer named Jeffrey Nordin, and its publisher is Caranthos Mori Games. A demo version is currently available on Steam where, it seems, you have the opportunity to try out three rooms, and it lasts for approximately two to three hours, depending on how quickly you solve the puzzles.
The game doesn’t have a linear story that’s easy to explain because it, and the location we’re in, are quite surreal to the point that it reminded me of Twin Peaks, but it also unlocked a childhood memory of a series called Carnivàle (mostly its intro).
The gameplay comes down to picking up and moving objects, clicking various triggers, and finding puzzle solutions. Additionally, the game lets you control your breathing and blinking yourself, thereby immersing you in the dream or even pulling you out of it if you’re not immediately ready for one puzzle, but want to try another. Every time you finish a puzzle in a room in the dream, the game switches you to the “reality,” where the room appears more filled in, but you are also one hour closer to nightfall.
When you’re working on the puzzles, your protagonist notes everything they observe in their surroundings in a section called Observations. Then, there’s an Intuitions section where the items are blurred and you can read them whenever you need to, and that’s what usually contains hints that push you in the right direction to solve the puzzle, and finally, the Knowledge system which tracks your progress.
Each room in the dream is different in its own way. Sometimes the floor will turn into lava, and the game will require you to jump on the furniture to find the numbers that make up the code needed to open the door and exit the dream. Other times you’ll have to play certain notes on the piano, and sometimes you will need to follow lights in a carefully constructed dungeon that will remind you of many of the games we all played a long, long time ago, where you also get your health as well as magic.
The rooms don’t require any knowledge outside of the game; all you need is logic and maybe a piece of paper to write down a few numbers. I feel like my problem was overthinking at least twice during the game. For example, in one room, there’s a clock. That same room might be the one with the easiest puzzle, and it took me up to an hour to find the solution that was right in front of my nose the whole time because it was so simple. Instead, I thought that would be too easy, so I started overthinking it, which was a huge mistake. The same thing happened in the room where the floor turns into lava. On the TV, there are different colors, and each color has its own letter. My first instinct was to try and find the number of each color, but the solution was much easier than that. Besides that, each room has its own radio that provides a tiny, let’s call it a hint, as well as very pleasant music.
If you’re wondering, “Where’s the horror in this game?”, I’ll tell you that this isn’t a classic horror game where your thinking will be accompanied by a bunch of jumpscares. The horror lies in the surreal, in encountering something foreign, in the suspense. After every puzzle, you’ll have a feeling of the unknown because you don’t know what the night brings with it.
A Dream That Finds A Reason To Exist
The House Dreams Along With Them is not an overly long game, although, admittedly, that depends on you and how you solve these puzzles. Again, this isn’t a classic horror game, but it still offers a sense of fear of the unknown. The puzzles are interesting enough, cleverly designed to ultimately reward you with a sense of satisfaction at the very end.
We would like to thank Caranthos Moti Games for providing us with a copy of the game for review purposes.
The House Dreams Along With Them (PC)
At first glance, the game might seem just like another puzzle adventure. However, as soon as you step into its world, you become part of an experience backed by hours of dedicated work, carefully crafted details, and the effort put into creating something much more complex than it appears at first. It's this depth that sets it apart and makes it special. If you're a fan of interesting, complex puzzles, I definitely recommend this game. And if you're interested in its lore, it's also worth playing The Logomancer, a game from the same developer, as well as the novel The Aspect of Separation.
