The House Dreams Along With Them (PC) Review

Allow me to let you in on a little secret, folks: When you’re in this line of work, every so often, you’re bound to wind up obligated to review a game whose target demographic clearly does not include you. That may not be totally apparent at first, but when you start playing such a game to start working on a review, you realize you’re not the most qualified among your colleagues to review the game in question. What I’m getting at is, that’s my situation with today’s subject: The House Dreams Along With Them, from developer Jeffrey Nordin and publisher Caranthos Mori Games.

The House Dreams Along With Them describes itself as “a first person puzzle adventure with an emphasis on interactivity and logic. Sleep and dream in the rooms of a mysterious house. Solve the puzzles to make the dreams real.” That description is what led me to think I might like The House Dreams Along With Them. Even though I’m usually not great at puzzle games, I can usually figure out how to get through exercises in logic. The House Dreams Along With Them is much more of a surreal experience than I expected, however. I think that’s what has most thrown me off.

You play as an unnamed, unseen character who’s apparently capable of both falling asleep and lucid dreaming at will. In the prologue of The House Dreams Along With Them, you encounter the titular house in your dreams. After you look around the place, gather clues, and solve a few puzzles, you encounter your first “burnt and rusted” object – a bed, in this case. You can interact with burnt and rusted objects by standing on them, crouching, holding a button to close your eyes, and then rapidly pressing a different button to control your breathing and fall asleep. This triggers lucid dreams.

After falling asleep on that disgusting bed, you wake up to find that not only is everything upside down so that you’re walking on what used to be the ceiling, but that the bed and everything else surrounding it is covered in purple flames. If you get stuck during a lucid dream, you can force yourself to hyperventilate to wake up. Shortly after your first dream, you wake up and discover the real-world location of that same house. Rather than just blaming all this on whatever you ate right before bed and moving on with your life, you travel to that house.

The house is in a very strange sort of disrepair. More of those burnt and rusted objects upon which you can sleep are present. This time, they include items such as a dining chair, the shower floor, and even a shovel carelessly thrown on the floor. Going through the steps to dream whilst atop one of these objects brings you into a different part of the house in the “dream realm,” with its own puzzles to solve. Exactly how in the blue blazes your character can fall asleep at will while lying upon a shovel is beyond me.

Hovering over each item with which you can trigger a dream tells you how much difficulty your character expects to have falling asleep there. My best guess is that this corresponds to the difficulty of the puzzles you’ll have to solve while lucid dreaming in that part of the house, but I honestly have no idea. The logic and interactivity required to solve puzzles and progress within The House Dreams Along With Them is obviously far beyond anything my brain can parse. That’s why I feel like I’m doing a disservice to The House Dreams Along With Them just by having requested to review it.

Considering how strange and surreal the core gameplay loop is within The House Dreams Along With Them, I feel vastly unqualified to review The House Dreams Along With Them on its own merits. I can’t blame The House Dreams Along With Them for that, but it’s the honest truth. Thus, I can only recommend purchasing The House Dreams Along With Them if you’re both much better at puzzle games than I am and more capable of tolerating an experience that must be somewhat similar to John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s mental states while they wrote every track on Magical Mystery Tour.

A PC review copy of The House Dreams Along With Them was provided by Caranthos Mori Games for this review.