IRENE.HOUSE

IRENE.HOUSE is not a game. It could perhaps politely be described as a "Walking Simulator" but walking simulators convey a story. The developer here has made it fairly clear this is not a game, but art that's been launched as a game on Steam, despite not being a game. This is typically done when local art galleries take out a restraining order, leaving the poor artist to have to pay $100 to self publish on Steam, in the perhaps confused belief that Steam is a digital art gallery with no minimum talent requirements. I'll leave the art critiquing to other gamers, what matters here are two key factors. First, if this was a game (which it isn't), it wouldn't meet basic standards for PC gaming, with locked controls and fixed, low resolution that makes every thing blurry. This goes well with the disjointed low poly houses and other art that look a lot like asset flips to me. It's slow paced and about as much fun as watching paint dry. Secondly, as I've mentioned, this isn't a game, so I can't recommend it to gamers.

What a mess. Nothing but slowly exploring boring repetitive environments with nonsensical audio and videos. The game manual recounts how the game was developed and at one point states "the project eventually outgrew the need for a narrative". Dude, what? Originally, there was a narrative that was given as a screenplay that you would have had to read while playing the game which was given via PDF file. So the game is paced and structured for the screenplay (which doesn't exist), and is both painfully slow and feels meaningless. Also it bugged several times. I got soft locked in the first 30 seconds. Another time it crashed so hard I had to restart my computer. You can look through walls by walking through them. A lake didn't spawn in for like 20 seconds after I got to a new level. The game's just sloppy. I enjoyed some of the visuals and ambiance, but considering you have to read the PDF manual to get a vague idea of what's going on, it's just not worth playing in my opinion. I know this "game" isn't a game per se, but when you're making an virtual exhibition, it would make sense to put the point of the experience within the experience, and not in a PDF that basically no o…

IRENE.HOUSE Positives: + Its different + Some parts are acceptable + The gallery mode is ok + Narrative 2 is ok because you can use 'Enter' to go to the next scene + Some parts are relaxing + Its free Negatives: - Mostly bad and glitchy graphics - A lot of bad and low quality sounds - Very hard to navigate in narrative 1 and 3 because you dont know where to go to activate the next scene - Not very much happening - Most of it makes no sense whatsoever - Mostly uninteresting videos and voiceovers - Badly optimized - Buggy and unstable - No main menu or options - Takes up 40 gb of space (whats that used on? long and uninteresting videoclips?) - A lot of bad design (looks like a 7 year old trying to make the first "game") - Very slow paced - Unless you read the instructions you dont know anything on what to do next (and even if you read it, you still dont understand much) - Frustrating and confusing to play because of this This is not a game, and not even a walking simulator. Its an experience, and a pretty bad one as well. I cant believe I spent almost 3 hours trying to figure out how this game works. I managed to get thru the narrative 2 and the gallery mode. In both narrative 1 a…

[h1]Before I played irenehouse, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

This feels like an alien came to our planet and was told to make a video game without ever being told what a video game is. It is empty, confusing, incredibly dark, and has no ending nor purpose. It tries to be artsy, but all of the textures look like they were made in the early 2000s with banana pudding as a reference. There is no rhyme or reason to go anywhere or do anything, there is zero interactivity, the imagery you look at is boring, literally dark, and repetative, there is little to no sound whatsoever, the only movement is WASD, mouse, and crouch, to progress through "levels" you need to walk around randomly until something triggers, sometimes nothing will trigger the first time so you need to keep going in circles until the game lets you go, etc. etc. etc., you could go on for hours on why this is a waste of time. Irene House attempts to be an art simulation without the art or the simulation. You just kind of walk around in nothingness and try to find out how to get to the next stint of nothingness. It really feels like a test demo for a game engine than anything else. Imagine teaching someone from 1910 how to program, never showing them what a video game is, and then te…