Digital Decay

Recently, I was listening to Versus Wolves, a podcast by two Youtubers/Twitch Streamers, Super Eyepatch Wolf and Wooly Versus. I do a lot of driving for work, which gives me a lot of time to listen to podcasts, and Versus Wolves is always my first choice when a new episode comes out. During one particular episode John (Super Eyepatch Wolf) mentioned he has recently streamed a short visual novel style horror game that had really stuck with him. Normally this wouldn't really pique my interest, but then he mentioned it was only around 30 minutes in length, and cost around $1, now you have my attention.

This Is Not Your House is a psychological horror themed choose your own adventure/visual novel game, developed by indie film maker, Cody Tierson under the pseudonym Trash Eyes. From my little bit of research it looks like this is Cody's first game he has released, however his itch.io page does also have page for a downloadable version of his short horror film Malady
The first thing you'll notice about This Is Not Your House is the two-tone art style, entirely made up of yellow for the lighter colours and a dark green for the darker colours (Aussie Aussie Aussie). This along with the heavy use of dithering helps to create a striking image right off the bat. I found it very remeniscent of a similar title, Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk, which happens to be the only other game in this genre I've played.

This Is Not Your House puts us in control of Roger, an elderly widower who's come home from a day running errands only to find that the locks to his house have been changed and there's someone else living in his house. This is a fear I never knew I had until I started playing this game.

"Roger always knew if he were attacked. It would happen on the walk from his car to his home. So he readied his house key before stepping out of the vehicle"

The opening lines of the game really paint a picture of the kind of man Roger is, a frail old man who's afraid of the world around him. I can kind of relate too, as a young teenager I hated leaving the house by myself, if I needed to go to our local shopping center by myself I'd be an anxious mess worried someone was going to start shit with me, even though there was no reason for this, I was just another person in the crowd. It took me years to get over this, someday it just went away, I had the confidence to go out by myself and not worry about what other people thought, or might do.
I think if what happened to old mate Roger had happened to me during that time though, things would be different, this is the kind of thing you don't just "get over".
I've been sitting here trying to figure out how to write about This Is Not Your House, and I'm really struggling, not because I don't have anything to say, but because this is a game that is best enjoyed without any prior knowledge to get the full impact of the experience.
The gameplay is made up of still images with a dialogue box below giving you a play by play of what's happening to Roger. Occasionally a choice is interjected into the mix, usually you are presented two options to pick between, but ocasionally it can be up to four options, and each choice is a split path in the narrative, leading to it's own outcome.
In total there are 10 possible outcomes for Rogers story, ranging from slightly unsettling, to psychadellic, or the most common, extremely morbid. If you're playing on steam you'll be awarded an achievement for each ending you reach, with names giving slight insights into what may happen to Roger if you unlock this achievement, for example Vagrant, Death Row, and Hypothermia all give a pretty good indication of what you're in for.
I'm not sure if this is a common feature for this style of game, but a feature I greatly appreciate is the skip feature. You will be replaying certain scenes over and over again if you're aiming for 100% completion like me, so the dev included a skip button which you can press to fast forward to the next branching choice intersection, this really helps to keep up the pace of the game.

The soundtrack was composed by Experimental Ambient musician Jamison Miles Jackson it's not something you actively notice a lot during your playthrough, it is very minimal, just helping to create the haunting ambience for the most part, but every now and then something big will catch you off guard. For me it was the track "Words" that plays during the Ego Death story path. It begins with an almost alien like feel, a low continuous drone hums while a deep echoey voice speaks unintelligable word with some spacey sounds interspersed. Just shy of the 1 minute mark there's a drastic shift in tone and the song becomes a mysterious disco track, with the deep voice from earlier now singing rather than speaking and his words are far more clear.

I used to speak with lips
But now I speak with hips
A dancing disco fiend
As strange as it seems
Moonwalking through your mind

When this song began I sat for the entire length, not daring to progress the story in case the song cut abruptly, I needed to hear it in its entirety.