Wooden House

I want to like small, rough horror experiments. I really do. When GDNomaD released Wooden House back in September 2016, the bones of something atmospheric were right there: a creaky first-person perspective, a rural cottage setting, voices drifting up from the basement, and the promise of an ancient evil uncoiling beneath the floorboards. That setup has worked for hundreds of tiny horror games. Here, it barely gets off the ground. The core loop is about as stripped down as a horror game can be without becoming a tech demo. You move through a handful of interior spaces, collect keys, and use them to open doors. One wire puzzle exists in the game, and players who have touched any other GDNomaD title will recognize it immediately because it is recycled from those earlier releases. The creature that eventually comes hunting for you is easy to sidestep, and the much-advertised "no tips" philosophy mostly means you will stare at poorly translated notes, try to decipher broken English, and open the next door anyway out of process of elimination. There is almost no tension in the chase sequences, and the campaign wraps up in around 20 minutes for most players. The audiovisual side is a mixed story. The environment leans into a cold, grey palette that at least conjures a faint chill, and a handful of community reviewers singled out the ambient soundscape as the one component that reaches toward atmosphere. That is a low bar to clear, but it is worth mentioning because the sound design, such as it is, does more heavy lifting than the monster, the story, or the visuals. The assets themselves are widely flagged as store-bought and shared across the developer's back catalogue, which strips away any sense of a handcrafted world. Stability is a real concern. The game has a documented habit of crashing when reloading a save after death, which matters somewhat less here given how short and low-stakes the run is, but it still leaves a sour impression. The story, which involves a mysterious book unleashing something ancient, has a legitimate hook buried inside it. Unfortunately the translation quality makes the notes and narrative beats genuinely hard to parse, and the game ends before it has time to do anything meaningful with the concept. Steam's user score sits in mostly-negative territory with good reason. If you are a completionist working through the GDNomaD catalogue, or you find something charming about lo-fi horror curios that carry more ambition than execution, Wooden House is a brief, harmless footnote. For anyone else, the time investment is minimal and so is the reward. It knows when it ends, I will grant it that much. It just does not give you a reason to care by the time it does.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Wooden House.