Ellingby House

Worth the price, which is fairly cheap. Good graphics, never crashed. I don't like the 'click to move' mechanic, mostly because sometimes it leaves me facing a different direction and I get confused about where I am.. There's one puzzle which I consider deeply unfair, and I had to use a playthrough at three other points which I'd never have solved myself. Nice plotting, with elements similar to The Bradwell Conspiracy and INFRA

Totally logical puzzles, great atmosphere, and fun, realistic villainy. Really enjoyed playing it with my 14-year-old son!

Ellingby House is a decrepit misery clicker disguised as an old‑school point‑and‑click adventure. The game doesn’t accidentally turn navigation into a grind; it’s built as a hostility engine. You don’t explore Ellingby House, you survive its UI. It’s like they remade Myst, then stapled a migraine to it. You don't get mouse control, you get a wobbly camera pretending to be the mouse that spins out of control if you try to make it fast enough in settings. The movement system is a hostile architecture exam. You don’t walk; you are teleported between 360° stills, each one daring you to find the single correct pixel‑arrow that doesn’t spin you back into the same corridor. Every turn feels like the game asking if you’re sure you want to be here, then punishing you for answering yes. Doors are a non‑renewable resource. The building will kindly let you use a door once, to prove that it technically can. After that, it remembers it’s Ellingby House and decides access should happen via toilet vents and side channels, not handles. The security office door is the purest example: usable from inside, mythological from outside, like a Schrödinger portal that only respects you when you’re leaving. If you want back in, the correct professional procedure is to crawl through a bathroom ventilation duct and pretend this is standard security practice. The building itself opens with a contradiction so loud you can hear it over the fans. You are told this place is crippled by ransomware and power issues, yet the entry sequence plays out like a showroom demo for perfectly maintained gate automation: barriers lifting, bollards dropping, doors cycling open on cue. Five minutes later you’re being carefully walked past the dead circuits, empty tanks and blown fuses that make that ballet impossible, and the game never even blushes. Everything that looks like it might be normal office life is either rotten or repurposed. The retirement table is still set, the “happy retirement, some other career is calling you” energy still hanging over cold food and abandoned decorations, but the person is gone and their diary is now a credential store for front‑desk logins. Your reward for noticing the sadness is being allowed to impersonate them on a boring terminal, painstakingly reading emails (in a too-small window needing scroll bars) from a security boss who escorts a fraudster out and then resigns, leaving you salaried inside someone else’s abandoned problem. Around you, notices calmly mention rats, cockroaches and Legionella in the water, like the building is filling in the “additional hazards” field on a risk assessment form while still inviting you in for a shift. It’s corporate collapse as environmental horror: crypto schemes upstairs, contaminated pipes downstairs, and you in the middle, without map or working concept, clicking on jerrycans and fuse boxes like that’s a reasonable thing to do in a condemned office. Put simply: Ellingby House is not content to be inconvenient or spooky. It insists on being structurally, narratively and ergonomically wrong at the same time, and then hands you an excuse for a mouse and says “night shift starts now” – turning movement into a kind of slow‑motion parkinson simulator where you never really walk, you just lurch from one miserable frame to the next.

This was quite a challenging game. Different from other point-and-click games in which you have to really read through a lot of information in order to get the correct puzzle solutions. Feels more realistic than most other point-and-clicks. The only really challenging part is near the end, which, if you're not quick enough, could result in one of the bad endings.

чёт фигня какая то..(

I had a lot of fun with this, I noticed some stark similarities to INFRA, another game I enjoy. I liked the story and I thought a lot of the puzzles were well done and made logical sense within the game world. The only thing I didn't like was that some of the items were very hard to miss (the allen wrench especially!). Also, I noticed that when I used the magnifying glass I had a ton of a lag, I don't know how that was supposed to work if I get 10 FPS when I use it.

Ellingby House is a charming, old-school Point'n'Click game with some live-actor FMV as well. As a security guard trapped in an old building in need of renovations, you have to find a way out and stop a catastrophe as well. I mostly bought the game because I heard some people say that it has INFRA vibes. INFRA is pretty much my favorite game of all time, so I just had to check this out. I will disagree on this point though; while the atmosphere is pretty good and some of the general vibe is similar, it's a completely different kind of game (point'n'click versus 3D walking sim / puzzle game). It didn't really give me the same feelings of abandonment and solitude that INFRA weaves so expertly, so I don't think they can be compared - but they don't have to be. Different games, different things. Overall, I did enjoy Ellingby House because it did really accurately give me that 90's Point'n'click vibe, in good and bad ways. Static screens you move through by clicking with a few transition animations, cheesy FMV sequences and puzzles you can't solve if you accidentally missed an item in a room two hours earlier. Annoying, sure, but there is a walkthrough on YouTube and most of the game is not that difficult if you pay attention. The only thing is that I would've liked some QOL features - you have to interact with many PC's, for example, and remember passwords and number codes, but there is no note feature, so you gotta remember or jot them down yourself. Well...I guess that's part of that old school vibe, too. Really the most annoying part I have to point out are the animations. Opening doors, or using elevators, and many other small things in the game play an animation you can't skip. This may sound like nitpicking, but it really adds up over time. In particular there is a door that opens, then closes behind you, and both of those animations together take about 25 seconds to resolve - and you will likely take that door 5 or 6 times at least. Same with the elevator - you have to wait until the animation finishes playing. And, accurate to real life, if you don't immediately exit the elevator, it closes in front of your face, so you have to turn around, and press the "Open Door" button. I commend the approach to realism, but it did get annoying. In conclusion - if you like this kind of game, Ellingby House will leave you pretty happy and I am glad people still make these classic point'n'click games. The actors do a good job, most of the game strikes a good balance between challenging and intuitive, and there is clearly a lot of charm to be found here. It's also not too long, so a nice way to spend a couple evenings. With a few more QOL additions, it could've been even better, but even so, I definitely recommend Ellingby House for lovers of good ol' adventure games.

The devs characterized this as "Myst-like" for its navigation similar to Myst's stillscreens you click between, though each screen in Ellingby House has full freelook. But I think more apt comparisons might be Infra (whose worst pitfalls Ellingby dodges well) and maybe The Painscreek Killings. Puzzles and story are grounded in real-life technologies which makes them more immediately relatable, with less "mystery meat" puzzle work. And while some of them can be quite difficult (intentionally or sometimes otherwise), nothing feels insulting or unfair. I'd give my kingdom for a hotspot indicator, as things that simply miss your notice are the biggest roadblock, but by and large Ellingby House is a well-executed puzzle adventure by a tiny two-person team, at a price that's more than fair.