tl;dr - fairly priced game, great sound design and art direction, pacing in the prequel chapters is incredible and had me scared constantly. Unfortunately it falls apart with uninspired and silly puzzles, terrible maze-like hallways, and an oppressive antagonist that left me too visually impaired to feel like I had any hope of escaping. There's definitely something here for a niche audience that likes replaying/perfecting the gameplay loop, but it wasn't for me.

This game has amazing sound design, a very well made aesthetic, and the build up in the prequel chapters leading up to the titular "House" was very well done.

Unfortunately, once you make it to The House, the game begins to slow to a near halt. This is the main part of the game, the prequel chapters can largely be looked at as walking simulators with limited interaction.

You're in a house where a killer (or multiple killers?) stalks the hallways. You need to escape by solving puzzles and exploring and at the same time avoid this killer. Where things really fell apart for me was in how hard it was to avoid this stupid killer, and there are a few things that all come together which made me ultimately give up and abandon the game.

Awareness
There is little to no warning for when the killer is nearby - I would be moving around and it was pretty much silent, and then the screen has a VHS distortion effect on it and then there's loud screaming sounds as the killer is now in front of me and stabbing or bashing me, moving after me at an incredibly fast pace. It was stunningly terrifying the first couple times, and quickly became frustrating and cheap after that. The distortion on the screen is very aggressive, and the killer is very fast... it was just so disorienting and ultimately I would always die to the killer when they found me.

Level Design
Understand that this is where the one-two knock-out punch came together to have me give up on this game. The areas are very small and cramped, and winding. Lots of turns to take in this cozy little house of horrors. The game is also very dark and you have a limited inventory that is slow to navigate through AND opening the inventory menu does not pause the game. There's the inventory menu which I would like to rely on but it doesn't pause the game, so there was a button on the controller to cycle through items which was even slower but you can move while cycling so this was mainly how I worked through the inventory system.

Puzzles...
Not much to say but the game is essentially an escape room with a bunch of nonsensical puzzles to wade through. I'll talk about the difficulty choices here and hopefully you understand why I put it in the section about puzzles. There were several difficulty settings, hard, normal, easy, exploration. Hard added a hunger/thirst system which I started the game on because my friends wanted me to suffer and I quite enjoy hard mode when I pick up horror games anyways (this mode was quickly dropped after 2 deaths in The House.) Normal is supposedly a standard mode without hunger/thirst and the killer has weaker awareness... but it didn't matter, because when the killer is near me the screen distorts HEAVILY with the aforementioned VHS static and my ears are lit up with screeching and screaming while the killer runs insanely fast toward me through extremely dark hallways filled with twists and turns. I never tried easy, after a few Normal mode attempts me and my friends decided "okay... maybe we should be starting on explore mode so we can at least understand the house." Bear in mind, we've literally solved nothing so far, the most I've done is pick up a granola bar, a lighter, an alarm clock, and a sound/light meter. So we played in Explore mode and through this mode we explored a large amount of the house (we made it to the backyard, which is where we finally gave up and quit.)
There isn't much to say about the puzzles, they're what you'd expect from something like this. You find a 4 digit tumbler lock and in a different area you find a piece of paper that says the answer on it, you take that item which lets you cut a wire in a different area so you can open a door to a new area and find another item to go back and get another item that lets you open another door that leads to a meat scale that you of course fill with human body parts so it explodes and a gear pops out that lets you change the time on a clock to 5 so that a hidden passageway opens on the nearby wall so you can carry on and get a new item, pretty standard horror game puzzle faire.

In the end, I was walking through a hall where the ground was pitch black with some silver/grey scratches on it, and I fell to my death (you can "die" 2 times before a gameover on the third death) because the pitch black and silver/grey ground was replaced with a slightly different looking pitch black and silver/grey hole filled with barbed wire (????) When I finally made it back to that area, I couldn't find my items I had lost, and some of them were (I assume) mission critical.

To be charitable to the game, I think there's an audience for the game. With how insanely difficult it was to hide from or avoid the killer, I think it's intended that you first play the game in explore mode. It was a hard enough game as it is just to navigate and solve the puzzles of the house without any killer breathing down (and breaking) your neck. After playing through the spooky horror house which, theoretically, shouldn't take too long to complete, you can do it all over again with the challenge of being hounded by a killer. Beyond that, you can challenge yourself further with the hard mode that makes the killer even harder to deal with AND adds survival mechanics with hunger/thirst. If this sounds appealing to you, I honestly think this game is a huge winner. Like I said at the start, the sound design is incredible, the build up to the spooks is fantastic, the art design is awesome and hits me hard in the ps1 nostalgia.

Unfortunately, I wanted something a little more compelling, and walking around a haunted house with no threats (besides the few you can walk in to, oopsie!) was very dull to me. There was also no middle ground, because even on normal mode, the killer felt oppressive and quite literally blinding.

If you love horror games, this is one of the best! Prepare to be terrified by one of the most horrifically insane titles to date! PLAY THIS NOW!