This House Is Haunted

Getting Started With This House Is Haunted

I spent about forty hours working through This House Is Haunted on PC, and honestly the experience is decent but flawed in ways most reviews don't bother mentioning. The core loop is simple enough: you play as a man who has inherited his estranged father's old home, and you spend the game exploring rooms, finding notes, activating mechanisms, and dealing with increasingly aggressive supernatural encounters. The atmosphere does most of the heavy lifting, but if you're just looking to actually finish it without burning out, there are a few things I learned the hard way. The game is available on Steam and you can grab it for around twenty dollars on sale. It will run on integrated graphics but the experience drops significantly if you're below a GTX 1060 or equivalent AMD card. The optimization is rough in the later chapters — I dropped from sixty fps to under thirty in the basement sequences without touching settings. Turn off ambient occlusion and lower your shadow quality first. That alone restores most of the framerate without making the game look like a 2012 mobile title. There is no DRM beyond Steamworks, so nothing extra to deal with. The save system is auto-save based with checkpoints at room transitions. You can also manually save from the pause menu, but there is a slight delay before the confirmation appears and I have had instances where I loaded three minutes too late. It is annoying but not game breaking.

Understanding the Core Mechanics

The game uses a stamina system tied to running and certain interaction animations. Your stamina bar sits in the bottom center of the HUD and recharges after roughly two seconds of not moving fast. The problem is the stamina drain is heavier than it appears, which matters because several chase sequences require sustained sprinting through long corridors. If you try to sprint the entire length of the main hallway during a chase, you will slow down mid-stride and die. Build in small walking bursts between sprints. Interaction triggers are proximity based, not click based for most objects. You do not need to press a button to pick up most items, but you do need to press E to open locked doors and activate certain switches. The game does not tell you this clearly until the second hour. I walked into a wall for ten minutes wondering why a door would not open because I was waiting for a prompt that never appeared. The puzzle system relies heavily on environmental observation. Notes you collect contain coordinates, symbols, or partial formulas that you need to apply to physical objects in the house. One early puzzle requires you to arrange candles on a mantelpiece based on a poem in a study note. The trick is the poem mentions positions in order of importance to the narrator, not spatial order. I wasted about twenty minutes aligning candles left to right before realizing the sequence was emotional, not geometric.

Chase Sequences and Enemy Behavior

The primary antagonist moves differently depending on which wing of the house you are in. In the main living areas, it patrols predictable routes with about four second gaps between rotations. In the basement and upper bedrooms, its pathing becomes erratic and it can detect you through walls if you remain stationary for more than five seconds. The workaround is constant low-level movement. Never stand still longer than three seconds, even when you think nothing is nearby. There are three types of encounters: pursuit chases, room lock-ins, and environmental hazards. Pursuit chases are the easiest if you memorize the layout. Room lock-ins happen when you enter a space and the door closes behind you, requiring you to solve a quick puzzle while something tries to break through. I found that hiding in closets does not work reliably in lock-in rooms. The entity finds you anyway. Instead, position yourself near the puzzle objective and solve it as fast as possible. Speed matters more than stealth in those scenarios. Environmental hazards include floor traps and falling debris. The game places these sparingly, usually two or three per chapter, but they are easy to miss because they trigger at foot level. Look for subtle discoloration on the floorboards. Darker patches usually indicate a trap tile. I died twice to a trap in chapter three because I assumed the floor was fine.

Collectibles and Ending Variants

This House Is Haunted has three endings, determined by a hidden alignment metric that tracks your choices throughout the game. There are twelve hidden collectible pages scattered across the house, and each one shifts the alignment slightly toward either acceptance, defiance, or flight. You do not need to find all twelve for the best ending, but you will miss significant story context if you find fewer than six. The alignments work in a counter-intuitive way. Fighting the entity directly — destroying altars, breaking mirrors, using the light flare ability — pushes you toward the defiance ending, which is widely considered the worst. The acceptance ending, which most players want, requires you to avoid confrontation and instead solve puzzles that restore order to the house. I ran into a wall of players on Reddit who were frustrated because they kept getting the bad ending despite thinking they were playing correctly. The issue is that using the light flare, which the game presents as a helpful tool, actively harms your alignment score. There is no multiplayer, no leaderboards, and no New Game Plus. A full playthrough takes approximately eight to twelve hours depending on how thoroughly you explore. The difficulty is consistent — there are no difficulty settings to adjust. If you struggle with the chase sequences, the game does not become easier. It stays the same.

Common Problems and Workarounds

The most frequent issue I encountered was audio desync during cutscenes on certain hardware configurations. The voice acting and ambient sounds would drift out of alignment by half a second or more, making dialogue nearly unreadable. The fix is to enable the audio subtitle option in the settings menu, which forces a text overlay. It is not ideal, but it resolves the problem entirely. Another issue is that the game occasionally fails to trigger the autosave before a major story beat. I lost about fifteen minutes of progress once because the checkpoint was three minutes behind where I actually was. Always manually save before entering a new wing of the house. The frame pacing is inconsistent in the engine's later scenes. Even on a 4070, I saw micro-stutters that disrupted combat timing. Running the game in borderless windowed mode instead of fullscreen reduced the stuttering noticeably, though it raised CPU usage by about eight percent. If you are experiencing choppiness, try switching display modes before adjusting graphics settings.

Final Notes

This House Is Haunted is a solid atmospheric horror experience with a clear narrative arc, but it carries enough technical debt and design missteps to make it frustrating at points. The core puzzle and exploration loop holds up well over a single playthrough, but the lack of replay value beyond chasing a different ending limits its long-term appeal. If you can get it on sale for ten dollars or less, it is worth the time. At full price, you might want to wait for a patch pass or two to address the stability issues.