It's a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible house. Wait, let's start that again. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into a horrible house. Wait, let's start that again: "You wake up as a House. Your limbs stretch through endless rooms filled with grotesque creatures. You can never see outside of yourself, never feel the world that lies beyond the fleshy walls of your body. You manage your insides as best you can, but you wonder: are you a good house or just a pale afterthought of the House Before?"
So goes the blurb for The House Before, an atypical body horror game from Gabriel Helfenstein and the art collective Fantasia Malware, which combines elements from visual novels and text adventure with a lot of lurid minigames. It's a journey through your own architectural guts that appears to span a variety of genres: first-person maze games, virtual pet games, top-down tile-based exploration. There are also some bespoke, eminently proddable interface designs that make me think of 90s game installers and virtual desktop music players.
The opening suggestion of being trapped inside your own form is wonderfully claustrophobic, but this seems like lighthearted pastiche in other respects. The creatures you'll meet are both garrulous and colourful. I swore never to idly compare things to vapo(u)rwave again, but I cannot deny the innermost yearnings of my soul: the aesthetics are quite vapo(u)rwavey in places. Look at those shimmering, oily pinks and purples on the "clock" screen. At other times, it's less of a shimmer, more of an ooze, and I think of Nickelodeon. In general, I'm always eager to play games that are ghastly and inventive composites.
The House Before is out November on Steam and Itch.io (the latter's store page isn't yet live as of writing). "If you enjoy short stories such as The Red Tower by Thomas Ligotti or games such as Growing My Grandpa! by Yames, The House Before is for you," notes a press release.
Here is what Alice O (RPS in peace) wrote about Growing My Grandpa!, back in 2024: "You can feed him everything a grandpa needs to grow up strong and healthy: stale cashews, brown bananas, fibreglass insulation, the usual grandpa foods. And absolutely you can even talk with your dear grandpa, once he grows a mouth." Here is a complementary gobbet from Ligotti's The Red Tower: "We are all talking and thinking about the Red Tower in our own degenerate way. I have only recorded what everyone is saying (though they may not know they are saying it), and sometimes what they have seen (though they may not know they have seen it)."
The press release adds that The House Before "won't be for everyone", even though it'll be pretty short at a few hours. I don't know what they're on about. Who wouldn't want to be the absolute worst house? If you prefer your houses to be more cheerful and flirtatious, there's always Building Relationships.
Helfenstein's previous games include North, from way back in 2016. Janksta backstabber Brendy (RPS in peace, grudgingly) wrote about North in one of his free game round-ups, which harbours a few other specimens of note.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/you-can-never-see-outside-of-yourself-the-house-before-is-a-body-horror-game-in-which-you-are-a-house-tunnelling-through-its-own-soul
