Many video game genres have been getting the spotlight in recent years, and puzzles games aren’t falling behind. The likes of Blue Prince grabbed everybody’s attention, mixing progression akin to roguelikes in a compulsive and eerie setting. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was similar, opening the doors to a house that seems straight out of the Resident Evil series, greeting players with a plethora of puzzles in every room and corner of the manor.
The House Dreams Along With Them, developed by Jeffrey Nordin and published by Caranthos Mori Games, feels both familiar and a peculiar standout. In a press version I’ve been playing, the adventure starts in darkness, mere footsteps away from an empty house. “The dreams started the night the moon fell,” the screen reads. “The one who is me and not me enters.”
Using a first-person perspective, the first steps into the house serve as an apt tutorial, as well as an introduction to the dreams that are ingrained in the experience as a whole. Some of the obstacles here are quite rudimentary: a locked door, a keypad, buttons on a wall. Yet, the complexity comes from the cleverness of the puzzles. In order to get the code for the keypad, I came across a clue that stated the occupant record, saying the following: one two, four eights. Obviously, inputting “1248” didn’t yield any results. Paying attention to how the clue was written out – one two, and four eights – was the key to move forward.
Whenever you interact with or inspect objects and places of interest, you start to gain entries for three different deduction categories: observations, listing all relevant items, intuitions, providing clues based on environmental cues or association and knowledge, which often has puzzle solutions for reference and hard facts about the room you’re in. For the solutions themselves, don’t fret, as they’re usually blurred and require you to manually clear the visibility. Plus, The House Dreams Along With Them isn’t exactly keen on holding your hand.
Once I was done with the puzzle, I was invited to rest on a burnt, rusted bed. This action, which you get to do often, has a pattern to follow: you must stand still on top of the object, crouch, close your eyes by scrolling down with the mouse wheel until your eyesight is completely obscured, and finalize with a right-click to breathe out to fall into slumber.
Completing this ritual for the first time took me to the same house again. But everything looked different. The decrepit bed was placed on the ceiling, with crimson fire emanating from it. Someone was loudly knocking on the door. Every room that I had grown acquainted with now looked… strange. The House Dreams Along With Them constantly toys with its architecture to confuse you, using empty rooms, columns that shapeshift while moving up and down, and dark spaces at every turn. Even if this demo doesn’t make a strong showcase of the story, there is a hint of horror here and there.
For this preview, the build had three puzzles after the tutorial. You’re once again back in the house, albeit during the day, which makes for a sharp contrast. Most rooms are empty, but there are three key objects around, which are, yet again, burnt and rusted. A bed, a table, and a chair, which is the order of complexity of the puzzles involved with each. Interacting with them gives you an estimation of how long each level will be. Or rather, each “lucid dream,” as described by the text on the screen.
The bed awakens you inside a room with a locked door. There are some key objects from the get-go: multiple drawers, office supplies, and a laptop. You come across a Post-it note with a code, which is related to both the password you need to access the laptop and the keypad needed to escape the room altogether. The solution ends up being quite involved, requiring you to use office supplies as environmental reference to apply a six-number code, inputting subsequent codes in reverse, and use your deductions up to that point to come up with the actual number you need. It was a cool introduction, and while it stumped me a bit, despite later realizing that I had the solution at hand earlier than I had thought, there was a clear logic from beginning to end.
The second puzzle promised to be more difficult. It was another room, but one that was centered around remote controllers, which were scattered around with seemingly no logic. Interacting with them didn’t do anything to the TV in the living room. It wasn’t until I turned off a lava lamp next to the locked door that the TV turned on. Doing so also turned the floor into lava, quite literally. The lit screen now showed me my task with a series of colors. Now, whenever I used a remote control, a number would show up underneath one of the colors. The total number was a perfect match for the keypad, so it became a matter of finding all remote controllers, while also making sure to avoid the lava.
Progressing through this puzzle wasn’t particularly difficult, but it was a great showcase of one of the strengths of The House Dreams Along With Them. I have a ton of respect for the likes of The Room series, in which you’re fiddling with puzzles in front of you. Yet, in here, there’s also an adventure and investigation component. I was able to jump around the living room using couches and coffee tables, but I also came across pieces of cardboard that I could use to lay down on the ground and extend my reach before a jump. Toward the end, I was missing one of the remote controllers, but I was able to brute force it due to already having the rest of the code at hand. After trying a few combinations, I was out of the puzzle.
Finally, it was intriguing to plunge into the third and final puzzle of the demo with all of this existing context. It starts in a similar manner, having you look for key objects around a room. Yet, this is all in service to boot up a medieval-themed dungeon exploration game within the room itself. The Temple of Cessation has you carrying a torch and, later on, using a sword and magic to solve puzzles in a completely different setting. The implementation is quite impressive, too – you first need to encounter a game pad, turn on a faux PlayStation 2 console, and insert a memory card. There are manuals with general hints about how to play and the backstory of the game scattered around the room. When you actually want to play, however, you need to be holding the gamepad before interacting with the TV. If you want to re-read one of the manuals, you have to exit the game instance and manually pick them up to do so. Meanwhile, Temple of Cessation remains on the TV, and resuming the game is almost instantaneous.
The third puzzle isn’t just impressive in how it weaves deduction, exploration, and adventuring together with an element of surprise over how it is carried over. It’s also a showcase of how far The House Dreams Along With Them is willing to push its dreams motif, as well as its general puzzle selection. Rather than following a strict structure and sticking to it, I was constantly taken out of my comfort zone. You can expect to get stuck quite often, but the puzzle variety being so enticing makes for a strong motivator.
I’m unsure of how the dream aspect will eventually play out when it’s fully realized. The house, for example, gets populated with the objects and furniture you come across in the lucid dreams. Toward the end of the demo, I started encountering puzzles on the “reality” house as well. The House Dreams Along With Them makes a solid first impression, infusing eeriness with an ever-surprising slate of obstacles to overcome. As familiar as it may seem at first, it doesn’t take long for it to take you into a series of increasingly surrealist dreams that are a joy to escape from.
