The Little Puzzle House… the title says it all. Lots of puzzles in a 5-room house. There is no story. Instead, you solve a set of diverse puzzles that include mechanical, pattern discovery/matching, a bit of math, and interpreting environmental clues. As you solve puzzles, you are granted access to new rooms. The centerpiece of the game is an 81-tile sudoku board which must be completed before entering the final area. It is missing a lot of tiles and these are scattered about, some in plain sight, and some behind other puzzles.
You can move freely through the house, using the WASD keys and the mouse (a controller is not supported). Active areas are indicated by a change in cursor and puzzles are solved by clicking on buttons or keypads. For the most part, puzzles are not difficult if you are paying attention. I did get stuck in several places but, looking back, these were not the fault of the game. In one case, I had not taken an action needed in another room. I also misinterpreted a couple of clues and went down some unnecessary mathematical rabbit holes. My biggest ‘stuck’ point was when an answer was in plain sight, and I did not see it (something about the forest and the trees comes to mind here).
For me, the hallmark of a good puzzle game is when I continue to mull over solutions, even when I am not playing. With The Little Puzzle House, I found myself thinking about a thermometer and red books while walking my dogs! Some would call this obsessive, but I prefer the term “fully engaged.” After I finished the last puzzle, I was expecting confetti and balloons. Alas, I simply received a “thank you for playing” message. Perhaps in Stephane Oriez’s next release…
There are a couple of ‘gotchas’ in the puzzle design. On the first mechanical puzzle you encounter, control buttons are not visible until you crouch. Then, from a crouch, you cannot see the surface of the puzzle that you are manipulating. There are also numerous keypads which require clicking. Values must be clicked in quick succession (tap-tap-tap-tap). A pause between clicks may result in an “incorrect” message, even if you are entering the appropriate sequence.
The game has multiple save slots and your progress is retained on partially finished puzzles. I appreciated this, as I worked on the sudoku task over multiple sessions. You must remember to manually save your game before exiting and there is no warning about unsaved changes if you forget.
The house is pleasant to spend time in. The soundtrack is generic, with an occasional verbal response regarding your success or failure at a puzzle. Overall, it is a worthy endeavor by a very small development team with a bit of assistance from AI.
Achievement hunters can relax. Currently, the game does not offer Steam achievements.
Despite my self-created roadblocks and the design idiosyncrasies mentioned earlier, The Little Puzzle House has an excellent set of puzzles… some easy and some that take serious thinking. I was reminded of the puzzle diversity in Escape: The Brothers Saloon, which I thought was brilliant.
I highly recommend The Little Puzzle House to those who seek a solid level of challenge and take pleasure in thoughtfully solving a conundrum. If you want to exercise your gray matter and don’t care about a story or characters, then you are likely to enjoy this game.
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