The original House was one of the first games I ever bought on Steam and one of my favorite in this niche horror Groundhog Day stuff, so this was one of the game I was most looking forward to seeing released. The change in artstyle is nice, reminds a lot the Fran Bow style, giving the characters more clear expressions and makes the deaths more graphic and brutal now. I'm glad the heavy and eerie atmosphere still there, along with the Yume Nikki influences, you still feel the dread, that there's something wrong and dreamish about the situation. The OST still great, as always. Overall, I loved it! But as I'm progressing the game, some problems came in a specific route of this game. Spoilers for one of the endings: [spoiler]The "true" ending route. This time, the entire loop all boils down to metanarrative, Tabby is being tortured for our entertainment and the entire thing is a TV show. Everything in this route ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. I do appreciate the devs for not trying to blame the player as usual, but this still the most overdone plot and lazy twists in recent years, along with the "It was all a dream" type story. And the work you have to do to achieve this route is simply not worth it. There's a game design dissonance in the desert, where you do all sorts of puzzles, but only one specific path matters in the end - to free Kimiko. The entire thing drags the game down, the map is huge, it's boring and it's not clear what matters. I'm used to this type of map because I love exploration but I feel bad for players that only want to get done with this section. In the end, after going for the true route, the game shifts the spotlight to Kimiko, that shoots the host and free Tabby from the network. That's it, that's the plan she was talking the entire game. Kimiko doesn't even seem to get along with Tabby, that seems all miserable in the end, so why did she bother to do it? Right thing to do? What about the others? I suppose we will more gradually, in more updates or DLCs., like the first game. The whole network Truman show sucks ass, and it makes me appreciate more the story of the original House.[/spoiler]
TL;DR it's a phenomenal haunted house horror game with some problems towards the end.
