I live under your house. (PC) review "Live, Laugh, Lovecraft."

When you first load I live under your house, you're convinced it's going to be another semi-artsy, surreal experience where absolutely nothing makes sense. You start off in a tunnel underground with the protagonist narrating its experiences by showing you around its humble abode that's quite literally a hole in the ground. You explore what few side branches the home features, eventually locating a sharp rock that you use to cut through a cocoon-like structure containing a decaying human body. “This is my mother,” nameless narrator says. “I crawled out of her body and ate pieces of her to stay alive.”

If you're into creepy, gross stuff, then you're in the right place...

The first few segments play out like a visual novel, where you read passages while (eerie and often disgusting) still images fill the screen. Talk of grotesque, taunting spirits and dining on human corpses strikes up, filling in the gaps regarding our host's backstory. Thankfully, the game doesn't bog you down with walls of text or incredibly deep descriptions. It keeps its language simple and to-the-point, effectively reading in the voice of a mind that barely understands human language.

Soon, a premise takes shape. Shaking earth and noise fill the creature's chamber, disrupting its otherwise peaceful life of digging a subterranean home and noshing on anyone who gets too close to it. The beast takes a gander outside to see construction crews building a house. At one point, it spies a couple of workers occupied with their job and thinks maybe it can just grab a little nibble. That's when you receive a choice that affects how the tale ends: do you devour the humans or let them be?



At first, you catch yourself thinking of the narrator as the villain. You don't want him to snack on the workers because they're people and he's not. That's a natural response. However, as the story progresses, you slowly find yourself slipping into the role of a villain-protagonist. The creature decides it wants to enter the house and grab a snack, and you become concerned for its safety. You worry that maybe a human will spot it and it'll be curtains for our hungry little friend...

Under Your House reverses standard horror rules by transitioning from a visual novel to a first-person adventure experience, where you guide the life form through the house and try to avoid being seen by humans. Yes, this is directly opposite of how almost every horror game works, and it's glorious. For once, you're the monster, and you're nervous a character who should be the hero might discover you and end your reign of terror. You mosey about the premises carefully, hoping not to alert someone who should be one of the monster's victims.



Let's complicate things a little, shall we? The creature eventually catches a glimpse of the homeowner, and immediately falls in love. Its prerogative shifts from wanting to devour its new neighbor to courting her, while not knowing how to do so. I mean, if you were a flesh-eating hellspawn living in a burrow, would you know the first thing about human romance? Of course not, and that should worry you because you know this little guy is going to do everything wrong, all in an effort to bolster your anxiety...

Over time, you kind of hope the beast gets what it wants, even though you know nothing good could come of it. You watch in agony as it completes tasks that definitely won't win over its love interest. For instance, it decides to grab the most beautiful skull from its collection and deposit it on its crush's floor, hoping she'll admire the corpse as much as the critter does. You just know it's not going to play out the way the beast wants, but you go through the motions anyway, knowing its monstrous little heart is eventually going to break.

One final segment sees you taking a trip down Memory Lane with some of the hapless victims ol' lover boy has snacked on over the years. By the end of this segment, everything draws to a close, with things turning out pretty much as you'd have expected. However, all depending on how you conducted yourself during the campaign, you'll receive one of three gruesome endings. The one that's sometimes considered the “good” ending is possibly the sickest, where we see our anti-hero's patience repaid in a stomach-churning fashion. Truly, this title never forgets what genre it belongs to...



Naturally, some players will lament that we never get to see the protagonist. Honestly, that's just as well because the game leaves you plenty of room for imagination. Sometimes there is no scarier character model than the one you create in your head. It doesn't matter what the main character is: a bug, rodent, snake, lizard, or some hybrid of the previously mentioned animals... What matters is what scares you, and what you imagine to be the most frightening thing that could emerge from that hole in the ground to strip the skin off passers-by and collect their skulls.

Under Your House is an excellent, short, unnerving distraction that represents an appreciable break from the genre's usual haunted houses, secret experiments (that are nonsensically contained in dilapidated buildings), and myriad works of zombie media. This one takes a completely different route, expertly reversing roles to craft a fresh and unforgettable horror experience.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 25, 2023) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.