House of Lizards

I went into House of Lizards expecting a throwaway novelty title and came out having hunted bipedal reptilians across Lake Baikal, Saint-Petersburg, Mars, and a planet called Nibiru. That escalation tells you almost everything you need to know. This is a first-person action game built around a very specific flavour of absurdist Slavic folk mythology: you play as one of five selectable Ancient Knights, your mission is to collect manuscripts, drink cans of Baikal Water for health, and systematically dismantle lizard operations across six locations that have no business existing in the same game together. The hero roster includes named characters like Billyslav Herringtonov and the literal god Perun, and the enemy lineup stretches to over 15 distinct lizard species. By any conventional design metric, this is low-budget indie territory. By the metric of "will I remember this game in two years," it punches considerably above its weight class. From a systems standpoint, the depth here is shallow but functional. Movement uses standard WASD, combat is direct and immediate, and the objective structure per location boils down to clearing lizards and grabbing collectibles. There is no real build system, no progression tree, no resource management loop worth calling strategic. For someone like me who normally needs a spreadsheet just to feel comfortable, that is genuinely freeing. The game runs short - community notes put the 100% achievement completion time at roughly one hour - which means the asking price needs to match expectations about playtime. What you get is closer to a curated experience than a sandbox, and the six locations, each with its own visual identity, keep the pace moving without overstaying. The single biggest complaint worth flagging: there is no tutorial. You are dropped in with no briefing on what the pickups do, why you are collecting certain items, or what the win condition looks like in practice. The controls are largely self-explanatory but the absence of any onboarding means your first twenty minutes will involve a lot of confused exploration. The phonk soundtrack and deliberately chaotic writing style suggest the developer intended disorientation as part of the experience, but a single instruction screen would have removed friction without hurting the vibe. Community feedback also surfaces some collision and pathfinding bugs - a boss reportedly sealing itself inside geometry in at least one level - though patch cadence has been active. Who is this actually for? Honestly, it sits in the same cabinet as games like Goat Simulator or various Russian meme-sim titles: the joke is part of the product, and the question is whether the underlying loop is fun enough to sustain it past the initial novelty. Here, the answer is a cautious yes. The weapons are genuinely strange, the location variety is real, the Steam user base has pushed it to a Very Positive rating on several hundred reviews, and the whole thing wraps up before it wears out its welcome. If your tolerance for rough edges is low or you need systemic depth to stay engaged, this will bounce off you immediately. If you have ever enjoyed a game specifically because it felt like it was made in a parallel universe, House of Lizards delivers that sensation with unusual consistency.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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