The Haunted Hoard: Puppet House (PS5)

Puppet House is a short first-person horror game that hinges pretty strongly on the conflict between you and a singular ventriloquist dummy. The now animate puppet of the late ventriloquist Peter Hill is a fairly well-considered villain visually, its uncanny appearance not unrealistic just for the sake of being creepy. It looks like it could have believably been used for its initial more innocent purpose, its huge head and eyes disproportionate but in a way appropriate for a puppet. It would still be a bit unsettling in the way many dolls can be, but he’s dressed like a young boy and doesn’t feel like he’s meant to be a figure of horror initially, wear and tear and a coating of grime helping it to actually look more intimidating now that it has come to life and is looking to end your life.

Puppet House sees you playing as Rick, a police detective heading to the house of the late Peter Hill after disappearances in a small place called Field Town align with people who were near the grounds of the home. It’s not long before Rick gets captured though and placed in the basement, his tormentor quickly revealed to be the ventriloquist’s old doll. While Peter’s puppet looks the part, the silent doll can’t communicate well with you and does a few baffling things like sitting within reach even after it previously approached Rick with obvious violent intent. At first Rick at least has the excuse he doesn’t believe the doll to be dangerous, but then the puppet will even have you essentially dead to rights and then pull back before killing you, and when Rick can easily punt the little doll away, it feels odd there is a conflict at all.

 

Eventually you come to learn why the puppet seems conflicted about actually ending your life and Rick finds actually putting it down for good is much harder than a good kick, but even in its short length, Puppet House waits a bit too long for those reveals, and the awkward voice acting of the protagonist isn’t used well to sell true confusion over the situation before you get your answers. Rick at least has a reason to stick around to find the puppet’s victims and end the murders and the gradual reveal of how the puppet came to be isn’t unexpected but still a decent kernel to follow. However the plot could have benefited from putting certain details forward earlier or at least acknowledging something it was doing is strange so it doesn’t feel like Rick and the puppet are just going through the motions of setting up a horror game with many sudden moments of violence that don’t end in death.

Despite its name, Puppet House does take place beyond just the two story home of Peter Hill, some surrounding buildings and an island across the lake expanding it beyond an admittedly moody and detailed but somewhat small home. Puppet House looks good for the most part save for the low detail on human corpses, and with looking around for useful items or clues on how to proceed being an important piece of the gameplay, it’s fortunate that the space is visually interesting even if a clue or two might be lost in the darkness and detail. Unfortunately, Puppet House’s puzzles are mostly the kind where you only need to find clues to solve them, and the clues are often just the answers on what you need to do. Far too often the full extent of a puzzle is to have found the answer on a note elsewhere, where Rick will take a photo of it for future reference so at least you don’t need to tromp back where he set it down. However, a good deal of essentially combination locks stand in your way, and while it can sometimes make it a bit more conceptually interesting like shooting animal targets or hearing the combination by tuning a radio, it’s still not asking much out of you, even in terms of memory. You can sometimes brute force it if the options aren’t too broad to make guessing it difficult, and sadly one of the few that is a proper puzzle involving using the controller’s rumble is so easy to solve you might figure it out through guesswork before you even pick up what you’re supposed to be using as clues.

 

Puppet House lacks much else to do beyond those puzzles too. Poking around spaces sometimes gives it the feel of a narrative adventure game with a few notes to find related to the plot, but even your violent encounters with Peter Hill’s puppet are either just cutscenes or at most ask you to press the required button when it appears on screen. Surprisingly near the end there are moments you can now actually die due to a few traps but you aren’t set back far for failure and they aren’t hard to circumvent once you understand to take them seriously as an unexpected bit of true danger. The brisk pace and frequent reappearance of the antagonist can at least set an uneasy tone as you don’t know when next you’ll encounter the puppet or what he might do since he seems to both help and severely hurt you depending on the scene. There are very few actions that can be considered optional as well so there’s not much to the game beyond following its story path, leaving Puppet House to lean mostly on ambience and the conflict between you and the puppet to sell you on an ultimately fairly basic horror experience.

THE VERDICT: The main puppet and the environments of Puppet House feel like they do a good job of being somewhat realistic before their horror twists are revealed or some layers of wear and grime are added, but pretty much every other part of this short horror game comes up lacking. Most every puzzle is actually just finding the answer to the latest variation on a combination lock elsewhere. The conflict between the main character and the doll feels like it’s playing out purely for the sake of a horror story until it finally tells you why neither character kills the other when they’re repeatedly at each other’s mercy. With the plot being pretty easy to predict from the moment you find the first important note as well, Puppet House ends up a bit like an unimaginative escape room despite having the visual chops for what could have been a more compelling short horror story.

 

And so, I give Puppet House for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. Puppet House feels a bit like an amateur horror film. From the voice actor’s weak performance as Rick to the doll being portrayed as a powerful threat despite its budget-friendly simplicity, and even the limited scope of the locations and the sometimes confused story-telling choices all feel apropos for someone’s early effort in realizing their ideas on screen. In the same way, you kind of find yourself looking for the good things like the visuals because while you come to expect it to be generally bad, finding the little elements that work becomes a way to extract some more authentic enjoyment from it. Puppet House isn’t overtly amateurish though, its wonky handling of human remains breaks the illusion of realism outside of the obviously fake living doll element but otherwise it could have been a legitimately entertaining experience if the puzzles were actually anything of substance. You might still balk at how often the doll and Rick encounter one another in inconclusive conflicts despite both wanting the other dead, but enough solid puzzle-solving would have allowed the simple horror story to serve as your tone setting element for a good puzzler. Instead, at best you’ll find the more complicated puzzles are things like a simple wire arrangement puzzle or realizing you should follow a line of yellow paint to the latest code you need to open a lock. The combination locks feel more like the kind you’d put into a game focused on its narrative to add a few interactive elements or to gate progress in an otherwise open space, but even if you only considered the notes, Puppet House doesn’t have a strong enough narrative to share to make it the heart of an experience. It could be far worse, besides moments where you might not spot a useful item or clue in a dark detailed space, everything in Puppet House runs well and leaves little room for confusion so you can move along to the next moment fairly well. Of course, Puppet House needs to do more than holding together for a few hours to make it actually worth a look.

 

Much like an amateur horror movie can be interesting to watch as part of a creator’s growth, Puppet House might be the a decent step for a team with some talent if they can learn from the issues here with their later efforts. They’ve got some elements that work, but it would be disingenuous to say those are enough to make this game truly good outside that context. They could have leaned more towards substantial puzzles or fleshed out the narrative into something that’s worthy of your interest, but as it is, Puppet House is not a lost cause of a game or even one that stings too much to play, but the room for improvement is undeniable since its ideas at present are too weak for it to stand on.