When House of Caravan was announced, it did instil positive expectations in me. Perhaps not surprising, when it’s being compared to the likes of P.T. and Gone Home; and especially not so when you learn that industry veterans with credits in franchises such as Silent Hill, F.E.A.R and The Witcher are involved in its development. So, assuming you’ve already peeked at the score on this page, you’ll have caught on that it’s not only failed to meet those expectations, but fallen short of even an average recommendation.
The game’s setting and opening are at least interesting. You play as a boy (in the early 20th century) who’s captured by strangers on his way back from school, and wakes up in an empty mansion. It’s therefore your task to find a way out of the mansion, and perhaps discover why you were taken there in the first place.
The gameplay consists entirely of exploration and light puzzle solving. You’ll find items and keys during your searching, which will help you unlock doors, chests and safes, and enable you to complete certain puzzles. You will find items in draws and cupboards, and just lying around in general. The puzzles are quite simple, requiring you to either find some sort of code or piece together torn messages. All in all, it’s not a very long game – you can complete it in around two hours – thus the actual puzzles are quite sparse and there’s little variety. There are notes to be found around the mansion, however, and you can inspect the finer details of your environment to get a better feel of the place and stretch out the time if you’re so inclined.
If you aren’t so inclined, however, it’s going to be a pretty open and shut experience; and unfortunately, one that doesn’t offer much in the way of emotional or intellectual engagement. The puzzles are not bad, but they aren’t exactly challenging (aside from the odd one not being very well explained), and certainly not very exciting. The mansion is nicely designed, with creepy portraits and suits of armour adorning the halls, which add to the atmosphere; but even then, the drive to explore just wasn’t there for me. I didn’t find anything particularly interesting, and the back-story you find from notes isn’t anything special.
I didn’t get that sense of investment that I did from Gone Home, where searching draws was exciting because there was always the potential for some juicy/revealing info about the family. There are the foundations of that here – notes reveal info about the family that own the house – but as I’ve already said, it’s nothing special. It probably doesn’t help either that the voice acting is lacklustre. I always feel a little bad about having a go at voice actors, especially from a small project; but there’s no avoiding it here. It takes away from any potential immersion when characters delivers their lines without, well, any character.
It’s also a clunky game, with your character moving around like he’s got weights attached to him; and there’s a lot of superficial environmental interaction. You can pick up most things in the mansion and inspect items in greater detail, but for the most part there’s no point. I also felt kind of misled by the whole ‘gothic horror’ description, as it seemed to be lacking in the scare department. I didn’t feel threatened or uneasy walking around the house (which I did in Gone Home, and that’s not even a horror game) and it all seems more ‘mystery’ than anything else.
That’s about 600 words with nothing much positive to say, but I gave the game a 4/10 instead of anything lower for a reason. Partly because the game works (that’s always a plus), but also because there was clearly some good thought that went into the game, which is evident in its pacing and structure. Yeah, it’s under two hours long and ultimately pretty disappointing as an experience, but you are kept moving around the mansion with a purpose, and there is a sense of progression and thought involved (it’s not just ‘find the next puzzle’, there will be a locked door or a puzzle with a missing item which you need to explore to solve).
But I’m not sure that makes it worth it, even for such a low priced title. There’s not enough decent content on offer and the gameplay is insipid. It’s a story based puzzler with neither an interesting story, nor particularly competent puzzles. It aspires to a lot, but fails to deliver, and in the end is a pretty sub-par experience.