Dad's Monster House

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A call from Dad in the night, and a house full of his monsters.

Platforms: PC, Mac, Xbox, iPhone, Android
Stores: Steam
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (94% of 292 reviews)
Players: 1
Made by: Cotton Game
Released: 2021

Get it on Steam Xbox (One, Series X|S)App Store Google Play

What frightens A late-night call from your father pulls you back to your childhood home, now a dark, black-and-white house full of stitched-together, grotesque yet oddly cute creatures, as you piece together the experiments and memories behind his disappearance. It is creepy and melancholy more than terrifying.
Content: creepy creatures, sad themes.

A hand-drawn, black-and-white puzzle adventure with horror touches. Carlos answers his father's distress call and returns to his old home, where strange creatures and puzzles stand between him and the truth about his father's experiments, with a choice at the end.

About Dad's Monster House

Dad's Monster House is a point-and-click puzzle adventure by Cotton Game, the Chinese studio behind the Isoland series. It came out in September 2021 on Steam for Windows and Mac and on iPhone and Android, and it is also sold on Xbox. A sequel, Dad's Monster House 2: MEDAL, followed in 2025.

In the middle of the night Carlos gets a call from the father he has not seen in years, begging him to come home and save him. The house he returns to is full of creatures: some sad, some funny, some grotesque, all drawn in black and white. Rooms are tied to memories, and as you collect items and clues you learn what his father, a scientist, was working on and what it cost his family.

The play is classic puzzle solving: examine every scene, note the symbols and codes in a built-in notebook, combine items and open the house room by room. Players find some puzzles hard enough to need a guide and say there is a lot of walking back and forth between rooms. The story is told in fragments, and at the end you decide whether to redeem it or end it.

Its horror is gentle: a gloomy, dark-toned house and creatures players call both creepy and cute, more unsettling than frightening. It suits puzzle fans who like the macabre atmosphere of the Rusty Lake games, and players who want a sad story with their spooks.

How to play Dad's Monster House

Get it on Steam, Xbox, the App Store or Google Play.
Explore your father's house scene by scene and examine everything.
Write the symbols and clues you find in the notebook.
Collect items, combine them and use them to solve puzzles and open new rooms.
Follow the memories to the end and make the final choice.

Screenshots

A bathroom where a round-faced creature in a cap sits in the bath beside a Slippery sign

A long-nosed creature in a striped hat playing a video game in front of an old TV, under a portrait labelled Turing

A two-headed creature on a bed in a room with a Freud portrait and a sign reading The Interpretation of Dreams

An empty fenced swimming pool with a sleeping spiky creature, a gramophone and a Next Summer sign

Tips

Use the notebook; clues for one puzzle are often found far from it.
Revisit rooms after solving something, since new items appear.
Talk to the creatures; many hint at what they need.
Look up a hint rather than quitting if a puzzle stalls you; players say a few are obscure.