Dad's Monster House

I have a soft spot for tiny studios that put a personal statement inside a puzzle game and hope someone finds it, and Cotton Game's Dad's Monster House is exactly that kind of artefact. You play Carlos, returning to a father's house he hasn't set foot in for years after a panicked late-night phone call. The house is wrong in the best possible way: every room holds one of dad's hand-built creations, part science experiment and part fever dream, drawn in a stark black-and-white charcoal style with only occasional flashes of colour for emphasis. The sound design does something special here, filling corridors with intermittent creaks and distant footsteps that make the place feel genuinely inhabited, even when nothing is trying to frighten you. The structure is a classic point-and-click mansion crawl. You wander rooms, pick up items, match clues found on walls to locks and mechanisms scattered elsewhere in the house. Puzzle types range from simple code-and-lock pairings, where a radio frequency scrawled on a wall lines up with a dial in another room, to more inventive logic challenges involving binary converters, planet symbols and Morse code. Some of those harder puzzles are satisfying to crack. Others lean toward connecting two obvious dots rather than genuinely testing you, which is the studio's long-standing habit and something to calibrate expectations around before you start. The inventory side of things is equally literal: a creature wants an item, you find that item, you deliver it. Cotton Game telegraphs almost every interaction clearly, which keeps newcomers from soft-locking themselves but can make veteran puzzle players feel like they're on rails. A free in-game map tracks rooms and remaining points of interest, which softens the backtracking considerably. What lifts the game above its mechanical limitations is the diary. A mutant spider guards its pages, and you unlock new entries by finding DNA pills scattered through the house and feeding them to the creature. The diary is a character study of a man who sacrificed a family for his work, and its accumulated weight is genuinely affecting by the time you reach the ending. The narrative lives almost entirely in those prose entries rather than in moment-to-moment gameplay, which creates a disconnect that more experienced adventure game players will notice. But the payoff for reaching the good ending is a post-game coda that sends you back through every room on a seek-and-find sequence, recontextualising the whole space as a thematic argument about memory and regret. It is a quietly brilliant structural move for a game this small. Know what you are getting into. This is a three-to-four hour experience, completable in a single sitting, with two endings and a post-credit layer waiting for those who stay curious. The monsters are cute rather than scary, the horror framing is mostly atmosphere, and the puzzles will not break anyone who has played Rusty Lake or the Isoland series before. If that sounds thin to you, it probably is not the game for you right now. But if you have any patience for hand-crafted small-studio work, for games that carry a personal dedication to scientists and faded memories in their about screen, and for sound design that earns its keep without a single jump scare, this is worth your afternoon.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Dad's Monster House.