In an effort to make us experience first-hand the kind of terror present in the sinister slashers that appeared just a tick before the genre’s Golden Age, Puppet Combo brings us Stay Out of the House; a new vicious video game now available on the Nintendo Switch.
In direct defiance of the games title, your ass definitely does not want to Stay Out of the House, in fact it won’t be much of a game if you do!
Rather, after playing through a couple of prologue stories (which aren’t mandatory, but naturally they add considerably to the world building at hand while offering a tense yet less intense experience than the main event… and one of them has a playable, Driller Killer-esque arcade game, so HUGE fuckin’ plus there boils n’ ghouls) you make your way to the eponymous structure, in which you will stealthy avoid the cannibals (including hiding from them underneath various pieces of furniture) that call the place Home Sweet Fuckin’ Home while solving various puzzles to progress further into the nightmare adventure!
Since this is a VIDEO game and all, I have to say, the visual style employed by ol’ P.C. for this title is pretty damn sharp; looking like a PS1 title, it’s easy to imagine this was some sort of lost game from the system’s heyday… and the choice of filters (mimicking VHS quality recordings from the ‘80’s up to 1999…with the latter being the most clear and easy to make out of the bunch) makes it easy to get absorbed into the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style proceedings. It’s fever-dream abstract and charmingly outdated all at once…
Adding to the pressure of making it through this ordeal alive is the fact that the player is faced with only three continues and a limited amount of saves which ratchets up the jitters considerably, as well as weapons that are basically there to offer the player some false hope because the cannibals don’t seem to mind getting hit with them much…
Thankfully there is some relief to be found in the game’s options, with an ability to just explore the game and soak in the terror tale on display without all that pesky cannibal interference. Also included are multiple endings, so replay value is high here if ya dig what the game is throwin’ down.
On the negative side of things, some of the controls are a bit touchy; especially when trying to interact with certain smaller items, and a few of the puzzles require more searching and backtracking than is comfortable with a cadre of psychos nippin’ at your heels!
Look, if you dig on the aforementioned TCM (and other fine fright flicks of a similar vein) Stay Out of the House is going to be a great time in front of the ol’ boob tube for sure; it’s style and atmosphere make it well worth a try my cats n’ creeps!
