House Hunted

About House Hunted

House Hunted is a small horror visual novel by Scopophobia Studios (mortisfox on itch.io), made in TyranoBuilder in three days as part of the maker's short Uncanny Valley series, which began with John Doe. It is sold on itch.io as a Windows download for a dollar or more.

You play someone new in town. After a long bus ride you are met by a realtor in a red blazer, grey hair swept back, eyes white and smile fixed, who tells you that you need a place to call your own. From there you look at houses, meet their sellers and visit the cafes and businesses of a town that seems ordinary at first.

The play is reading and choosing: dialogue runs in a text box over backgrounds that look like smeared, over-filtered photographs of real streets and buildings, with drawn characters standing in front of them. Your choices lead to one of four endings, and the maker says you can see all of them in 15 to 20 minutes.

The fear is the uncanny kind. The maker lists staring, unsettling smiles, needy sellers, hungry houses, digestion and a large predator, and tags it violent and creepy. It suits players who like strange, short horror with a dark sense of humour about everyday errands, and anyone who has felt a salesman smile a little too long.

How to play House Hunted

1. Buy House Hunted on itch.io for 1 dollar or more and download the Windows zip (32-bit or 64-bit).
2. Unzip it and run the game.
3. Click to advance the text as you arrive in town and meet the realtor.
4. Choose which houses to see and how to answer the people you meet.
5. Play again with other choices to find the rest of the four endings.

Tips

• Save before each choice with the save button in the text box so you can go back for other endings.
• Use the skip button on later runs to move quickly through text you have already read.
• One run takes only a few minutes, so play it through in one sitting with the sound on.

Questions