House of Caravan

Indie games have been around for a while now, there’s been small indie games circling around with creative art styles and gameplay and there have been larger, better looking indie games that have changed the way we as players look at the indie scene entirely, with their jaw dropping graphics, their great sense of atmosphere, their immersion and level design and just the creativity in gameplay that they make due to having budget constraints. House of Caravan does none of that.

House of Caravan is an indie horror game that was meant to not be played seriously, to the point where people have speed ran the game in 11.57 seconds. The game was compared to P.T. and being in the same genre as it, but that is a terrible comparison as the game has nothing that P.T had, it doesn’t even have horror!

With shoddy graphics, boring walking and reading gameplay, terrible lighting and environment design, an almost broken and pointless level design, and more things that just pull the experience down.

Boredom of Caravan

The game begins with you, a child, getting kidnapped by a weird looking man in a 2D art-work cut scene which was pretty cool actually. The man puts you in his carriage and you are then automatically put into a random room in a random house with terrible lighting, and you must find your way out and get to your mother. The game starts with the player character in a candle lit room, where you must walk around until you eventually find your way out of the room. The entire premise of the game is just walking around the house with random jump scares as a prop in the environment falls every now and then, or a gust of wind will open a window or a door would creak and that’s about the scariest this game can get or will get. The game looks like it was made in 2004, with the hallways that are genuinely lit with a lot of candles being completely dark; the lighting it seems was baked in terribly and has no effect on the surfaces other than the ones it was baked in, the textures seem to be non-existent and the gameplay, well I’ve said it’s a walking simulator but it’s more of a listening to notes scattered all around the house simulator, and solving boring and easy puzzles simulator.

Short and Unsavoury

There is a good thing about this game, it is very breakable. You can find bugs and exploits all around the game, now usually this is a bad thing in most games, but seeing as this game does not have anything else going for it, this will be its highlights for me, breaking the game and ending it in 12 seconds was probably the most fun I had in the game, granted it did last for only 12 seconds but it is what it is.

There are many bugs in this game and trying to see how badly one can break it is probably the only fun thing to come out of it, the voice acting is good when it comes to the actor voicing the protagonist, the voiced letters are kind of abysmal sounding, it sounds like the developer just did the voice acting themselves after making the game (which probably took them only a few hours).

Nothing Going On

House of Caravan is an indie game with no budget, I do not mean to mindlessly rant about how boring or bad the game is, but there is nothing creative going on in this game. The lighting is a broken mess, the graphics are severely outdated and the gameplay is non-existent.

Pros

• The Intro Cut scene was pretty cool
• The voice acting on the protagonist

Cons

• Terrible graphics and lighting
• Non-existent gameplay
• Boring story-telling
• Puzzles are too easy