Welcome Home. You Probably Shouldn’t Have Come Back.
House of Lost Souls wants to pull you into a slow-burning, memory-haunted nightmare set inside a rotting family mansion. You play as Jack, a man returning to his childhood home in the wake of deep personal trauma. The house, once a place of warmth, is now a surreal space of whispers, flickering lights, and doors that groan open as if reluctant to reveal the past.
It’s a psychological horror story at heart. And while it shoots for emotional depth and thematic weight—grief, guilt, mental illness—it also fumbles some of the basics, like working doors, clear objectives, and consistent voice acting. The result is a haunting experience with flashes of brilliance, buried under layers of mechanical jank and narrative missteps.
What Kind of Game Is House of Lost Souls?
It’s a first-person horror adventure that blends environmental storytelling, puzzle-solving, and walking simulator mechanics. The majority of your time is spent navigating Jack’s old family home and the nearby woods, picking up cryptic clues, uncovering fragments of family history, and trying to make sense of what happened all those years ago.
There’s no combat, no enemy to shoot—just you, your memories, and a very confused flashlight.
Instead of monsters, the tension comes from the environment. Doors open slowly, lights flicker unexpectedly, and voices echo from empty rooms. You’ll spend hours walking through rooms that change slightly every time you return, never sure whether you’re retracing your steps or stepping into a new nightmare altogether.
Trauma and Ghosts (And Maybe a Raccoon?)
Jack’s return to the family estate is motivated by loss. The house is both a literal and metaphorical time capsule—decayed yet familiar, filled with photographs, forgotten letters, and belongings left to rot. The narrative leans heavily on symbolic storytelling. A burned-out fireplace becomes the “heart of the house.” A hidden nursery reflects innocence lost. Ghostly apparitions take on family roles, reenacting half-remembered moments.
The writing tries to tackle heavy themes: the long shadow of parental abuse, the fracturing effects of grief, and the unreliable nature of memory. But while the premise is sound, the actual delivery is uneven. Dialogue is overly melodramatic at times (“No, Father. This is your sin, not mine!”), and the inner monologues sometimes sound like high school theater.
Despite the clunky delivery, the game’s emotional core is clear—it wants to be taken seriously. There’s ambition here, even if it occasionally collapses under its own weight.
A Lot of Walking, A Little Solving, and Some Yelling
House of Lost Souls is structured around slow-paced environmental exploration. Your main tasks boil down to:
- Finding keys
- Solving minor puzzles
- Reading diary entries
- Unlocking doors (if the game lets you)
- Enduring jump scares
- Backtracking… a lot
If that sounds light on gameplay variety—it is. While the house is visually layered and atmospheric, the actual game mechanics are barebones. You’ll find a locked door, discover a key on a shelf, and expect that to work—only to find the door still won’t budge. This isn’t just frustrating—it’s frequent.
Worse, the game offers little to no guidance. Objectives often require pixel hunting or standing in a specific spot to trigger a voice line. Puzzles can be needlessly opaque (at one point, you’re expected to “light the heart of the house”—but nothing in-game tells you that means using an item in the fireplace).
The flashlight mechanic is another missed opportunity. It’s a staple in horror games, but here it’s more decorative than useful. Darkness is everywhere, but you rarely feel in control of how to navigate it.
Cheap, Loud, and Occasionally Effective
House of Lost Souls uses jump scares like seasoning—sprinkled everywhere, often to mixed effect. A loud sound, a flash of a ghost, a painting that moves—these tricks come often, and while they might jolt you the first few times, they quickly become predictable.
That said, the game does get the atmosphere right. The house itself feels cursed, lived-in, and emotionally heavy. Some scares are clever—an apparition appearing where a family portrait used to be, or doors opening behind you silently—but many are the kind of sudden noise blasts you’ve seen a dozen times before.
When the horror leans into psychological territory—shifting layouts, whispered voices, distorted memories—it gets close to something meaningful. You feel like you’re unearthing a past that doesn’t want to be remembered. But that tension is often undone by the next door that won’t open because the game bugged out again.
The Real Villain
Where this game truly loses points is in its technical execution. These issues aren’t rare—they’re baked into the experience:
- Bugs: Key items don’t appear. Doors won’t open. Objectives fail to trigger.
- Poor Interactivity: Items often have invisible hitboxes or require standing in absurdly specific spots.
- Pacing Slumps: Too much time is spent walking in circles, unsure if you’ve missed a trigger.
- Voice Acting: Inconsistent quality. Some lines are delivered with conviction, others are awkward or flat-out laughable.
To make matters worse, some scares repeat themselves, and when the same ghost screams at you for the third time, you stop reacting and start rolling your eyes.
Visuals and Sound
The house itself is visually well done. Lighting and shadows are used to good effect, textures are appropriately grimy, and the environmental storytelling is where the game shines most. You’ll find rooms preserved in eerie stillness—like a child’s bedroom untouched since tragedy, or a kitchen mid-meal, abandoned in haste.
Sound design is a standout. From ambient creaks and groans to unsettling whispers and distant crying, the game knows how to make you uneasy. It’s often the quiet that scares you most.
Unfortunately, technical flaws—like lighting glitches or random texture pop-ins—can occasionally undercut these strengths.
House of Lost Souls – Why This House Needs Renovation (Not Just Spiritually)
✅ Atmosphere That Pulls You In
- Atmosphere: Creepy, consistent, and occasionally chilling.
- Narrative Themes: Ambitious attempt to tackle trauma and memory.
- Environmental Detail: Every room tells a story, even if the game forgets to tell you how to read it.
- Sound Design: Genuinely unsettling, with strong audio cues.
❌ Bugs That Break Immersion at Every Turn
- Buggy and Unstable: Doors, keys, triggers—nothing works reliably.
- Poor Guidance: No objective markers or logic to progression.
- Shallow Gameplay Loop: Exploration without variety quickly becomes tiring.
- Overdone Jump Scares: Loud, repetitive, and ultimately ineffective.
- Melodramatic Writing: Dialogue often undercuts the serious tone it aims for.
House of Lost Souls: House of Lost Souls wants to be a thoughtful exploration of grief wrapped in a psychological horror experience. In some ways, it succeeds—it captures the emotional weight of returning to a place that holds nothing but pain. But the game can’t get out of its own way. For every genuinely creepy moment, there’s a broken door. For every emotional payoff, a badly delivered monologue. This is a haunted house game built on a good foundation—but one that desperately needs more time in development, better writing, and fewer ghost screeches. – ColdMoon