Blind House

A game about two females in an ambiguous relationship.  By Maude Overton.

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This game was very effective at setting a particular mood, and at molding the player's impression of the player character.  The narative voice, Helena, has just survived a fight in which she killed someone, maybe.  She calls on Marissa, the only person she knows she can trust, maybe.  Marissa invites her into her home, where Helena suffers through the night, and wakes to find Marissa has gone out for the day, maybe.  Helena offers such an unreliable narative voice that the player is never certain if anything she reports is real.  And through the course of the story, Helena's thoughts become increasingly disturbed.  She is paranoid, delusional, intrusive, possibly violent, downright nuts.

Puzzles are used here as a pacing mechanism.  This works well enough, but can be annoying if the player gets stuck and isn't sure what they need to do to advance the narative.  The game provides some hints about motivation on the status line.  These help, but not always.  I found two possible endings, which aren't fundamentally different from one another.  Neither provided much insight about what really happened in the story.  I guess that's OK, but it left me feeling that the narative was incomplete.  I don't know if there are other possible endings.  I suspect there might be.

I'm not going to reveal my score on this one, because I haven't quite decided.  I will say that I've played about half a dozen comp games so far, and I've been very happy with the quality of this years selection.  Blind House included.