House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets

Huge backlog of HOG games, not helped by Steam sales, so let’s get into this one. Which has trading cards, for some reason, although I can’t imagine anyone caring enough to want to get them.

We are Random J Female Writer who is invited to a seance, only to encounter her Grandmother Margaret Fox (of the cracking toe knuckles fame) who wants to be vindicated so sends you to a house that appears randomly. Of course, you go, and then get caught up in a series of puzzles that occasionally have HOG parts, but otherwise feature annoying inventory puzzles. The story is rather basic, and really is only there to connect four separate smaller stories. At least the bonus chapter (which all collectors edition seem to have) is more personally connected with the main character.

I will say that I like the hint system, in that you aren’t penalised for using it (no badges/achievements), and no penalty for bad clicking. Which means you can click spam your way through the HOG parts, but I prefer that over continual annoying smackdowns because I clicked one pixel to the left of what it wanted. However, the HOG are annoying in that the list of items only lists eight, even if there are more than eight (which there are), but only the displayed eight can be clicked. So although the tenth item might be a pen, you need to clear two other items away before you can pick it up. The mini games are all right, but there were a few I was like “nope, don’t care”, and again there’s the nice handy skip option, so that’s good.

A fun game overall, and it took me six hours to get through, but it has room for improvements.

[END]