The House

Overview

Clicking a floor tile is the only way forward: the protagonist routes tile by tile through a house whose exit door is locked from the first scene, and each room adds another sealed door, a hidden switch, or a clue buried in the furniture until the place decides you may leave. The House is a short browser point-and-click horror by Artur Kot, written in plain HTML, CSS, and jQuery and released under the MIT licence as his first finished game. Rooms are tiled grids with collision — beds, desks, shelves, and plants block movement — and the character is walked to a hotspot by an A* pathfinder before any item, window, or door can be examined. Sound is carried by droning Freesound pads, creaks, and a creepy phone, and the experience is deliberately brief: one sitting of inventory puzzles, cutscenes, and a secret corridor that only appears once the right object is used. It appeals to players who want a tense twenty-minute exploration rather than a sprawling simulation, and to anyone curious how far vanilla DOM scripting can stretch toward atmosphere.

How to Play

Interaction is entirely mouse-driven — there are no keyboard bindings. Click any floor tile and the character walks there along a computed path; click an item, door, window, or hotspot and he first walks to it, then inspects, takes, or uses it. Hover furniture and doors for tooltips, watch the inventory strip at the screen edge for picked-up objects, and follow the speech-balloon and dialogue-box prompts that nudge the next step. The exit door and several inner doors stay locked until the correct item or switch clears them, and progress is saved to local storage via jStorage, so closing the tab mid-house resumes where you left off. Open the settings panel to reset the run from scratch, and toggle the speaker icon to mute the drone.

Tips & Strategy

Hover everything before clicking. Tooltips name the interactable hotspots, and in a game this short the puzzles hinge on spotting the one object that is not decorative — a note on a desk, a phone, a plant — rather than walking past it. When a door plays a locked-buzz sound, stop forcing it: that signal means an item is missing elsewhere, so backtrack and re-sweep each room's furniture and views. Windows are not scenery. Several peer into adjacent spaces (an aquarium, a boiler room, a corridor), and one view changes after a later event, so look through a window again whenever you feel stuck. Pick up every object the first time you see it, because the inventory gates both the hidden-corridor reveal and the final exit. If the protagonist stops responding to a click, you probably targeted a tile sitting behind collision furniture — aim for open floor instead. Treat the locked exit as a checklist, not a wall: it opens the moment the house has nothing left to show you.