If you like the kind of creepy that burrows under
your skin and grates against your bones, this will be the best $2.99 you
ever spend.
It is a tale of a house, or rather every house, and as the website
says “every house is haunted”. Not because of anything in
particular, but because of the possibility of any of those things.
I can’t tell you much without, to some extent, spoiling a uniquely
unsettling experience. So I will try and tell you just enough to pique
your interest.
The strength is in the telling of the tale, one that draws an analogy
between a house and a human body. It is told through cassette tapes that
you find and then play, and is “seen” via a video tape that is
loaded at the very start. In one sense you are watching what is
happening, but you are obviously a participant. You certainly aren’t
in control though.
It is graphically lo-fi, but it matters not at all. It starts
mundanely; walk around, try and open locked doors, eventually find a
tape and insert it in a cassette player and listen. Then get a prompt as
to the next tape, discover a now unlocked door, retrieve the tape and
repeat. Mundane as I said.
Except that it is dark, and the analogy about the human body talks of
basements being like the places we bury those things we don’t want to
recall, and then we have to go down there, and it is very dark, and you
stick to the walls because its more comforting that way.
And so you go on, and then it ends, 10 minutes or so after it
started. You find yourself back at the desktop. Is that it, you think?
Did something go wrong? So you start it up again.
And things have changed. And the creep factor goes up.
Then it ends again and you do it again, despite the fact that you
remember shouting “don’t go in there” at all those stupid people
in those would-be horror films and wondering why they always do.
And eventually you get to what is probably the end, but you can’t
be sure, so you wait. Eventually you exit, and ponder how something so
minimalist in many respects can be so wonderfully, suggestively,
atmospheric.
More mundanely (once again), you don’t save, but you don’t need
to. Being thrown back to the desktop ostensibly does that, and it only
takes 10 minutes or so for that to happen each time. You use the W key
to move forward, steering with the mouse, and left click to pick up the
tapes.
I didn’t know of Kitty until this. I will make it my business to
know her a lot more.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
