If you’re familiar at all with the Indie Horror scene, you know about Puppet Combo.
From the home-invasion slasher of Power Drill Massacre to the twisting dreaminess of The Glass Staircase, Puppet Combo casts a wide net in their vision of horror. While having tried many different things, Stay Out of the House feels like a culmination of those efforts by providing a terrifying, mechanically deep, and surprisingly vertical addition to indie survival horror.
Stay Out of the House opens with a vignette of a night-shift worker at a gas station. A brief chat with your co-worker informs you the phone is not working. Windows beside the register look out to an empty lot, heavy lights cast down on the warped, PS1-era textures. The only sound filling your ears is the scratching of the broom you’re pushing across the laminated floors. Occasionally, a car pulls up and you return to tend the register, wary of each shifty-looking person who comes in.
Look, you know you’re getting abducted, you just don’t know when.
It’s a great play on anticipation and displays what Puppet Combo can achieve when they show some restraint. It’s something that isn’t shown much in the rest of the game, but it’s a nice primer and goes a long way to make the experience feel more fleshed out. It feels like a glorious first kill in an 80′ slasher before the title role, an appetizer before the meal. While maybe a little detached from the actual gameplay loop, it’s a nice opener that I think is a little undone by what comes immediately after.
You don’t get into the meat of the game until after the next sequence which feels like another opener. You take control of another character and spend some time wandering fields and looking for your lost partner, before finding the titular House and its deranged residents. This sequence felt more fitting to the full game however it kills some of the momentum that was established in the gas station intro. It would have been nice to ride the high off the extremely earned jumpscare that ends the scene, rather than start over.
Soon, as we all expected, you get abducted–again. You awaken in a chain-link cage. Beside you, a tv beams religious propaganda into your head. A single dull light on a nearby table illuminates the room. The killer has left you alone for a moment, you have to escape! This is where the bulk of the gameplay comes in. You have one goal; Get out of the house. Similar to Nun Massacre, you’re tasked with navigating a massive house with little to no guidance, using an assortment of tools and key items to stumble your way forward.
Limited inventory slots and items such as video cassette tapes to save your game and a light monitor make Stay out of the House feel like it’s flirting with the immersive sim genre.
These tools provide invaluable information about your current state of stealth or the killer’s location, but cost you precious inventory space. Do I play a little more defensively, keeping track of how visible I am? Or do I trust my gut and hope I’m staying in the shadows so I can maximize my inventory? It’s decisions like these that make survival horror what it is.
Doubling down on this immersive sim, old-school horror homage, you have a safe room. Tucked away through the air ducts you find a room with nothing but a TV and a VCR. Using precious cassette tapes you can save your progress. I ended up using this space as I did the typewriters areas in Resident Evil 0; with no storage chest in the game, I’d come back here and dump all the resources I found on my expeditions throughout the house.
With only a handful of inventory slots, the game asks you to make brief outings. You knife around corners while learning your route to-and-from the safety of the upstairs as you scavenge for items, health and ammo. It’s a beautiful gameplay loop drawing on countless survival horror classics. It works so well because the tension of navigating the house and dodging the killers within is heightened because you have some form of reprieve. You can take a moment to relax, offload some items, examine whichever new ones you picked up, and wrack your brain for potential locations to explore next. A pause in the flow of the horror builds tension on the upswing and regulates the pace of the game. Good stuff.
The house itself is simple at first glance–a general horseshoe shape around a basement, 1st and 2nd floor. But as you explore you find boarded-up rooms, air ducts that lead to point-of-no-return drop-offs, and entirely hidden wings of the house.
The filth-ridden and claustrophobic home recalls Resident Evil 7’s Baker Mansion–it even includes a mysterious granny confined to a motorized wheelchair! The sharp turns, short always, and crowded rooms make for tense navigation. There are enough breaks in line-of-sight from one room to the next that you feel empowered to sneak around, but never enough cover to feel totally safe. You learn to pick out the safer rooms–those connected to shortcut ventilation shafts or those with closets to hide in–in your mental map of the house. It’s a trick that any survival horror enjoyer has honed throughout their lives. It’s great to see Puppet Combo embrace so wholeheartedly the pace and systems of exploration that the classics have engrained in the genre.
Part of the joy that comes with survival horror of this scope is learning the layout of your environment. What begins as a disorienting series of rooms and switch-back hallways, unreliable lights and locked doors, soon become a memorized series of shortcuts and safe routes. Even if you get turned around and wind up back in the room with the human-skin bear rug, you’re slowly piecing together a mental map of the house. Each time you set out you get a little more comfortable, you know which sounds and sights to look out for, which items to grab, and which to avoid.
But it wouldn’t be a Puppet Combo game without some explosive jumpscares and gratuitous violence, and Stay Out of the House has that in spades. The residents of the house are not so happy you escaped your cage and will hunt you down should they spot you skulking around. The butcher spends most of his time chopping up his victims in the kitchen, patrolling back and forth to God-knows-where, while a wheelchair-bound elder zooms around the home as if doing chores. The size of the house compared to the number of attackers and their attached patrol routes strikes a perfect balance of pressure and reprieve on the player. You’re never made to feel harried by their presence, but you know lingering too long in a place you shouldn’t will result in a swift hammer to the head. It feeds back into the risk of exploration–do I press on with all these newly acquired items and risk running into Granny? Or do I dart back upstairs, offload, and lose track of where they’re at in the house?
Should they catch you, and you’re unable to escape, you’ll be knocked out for round 2. You get three attempts to escape the house and each time you’re caught results in you waking up in a new location, with new traps laid about the house in defense of your inevitable troublemaking. Get caught one night and you might find the first-floor hallways now rigged with cameras, or the hallway lined with bear traps. It’s taking a page out of games like Granny, which react to your efforts to escape and puts you on a timeline to do so, but it all comes with the flourish and flavor of Puppet Combo games, and damn it, it just works.
I’d have liked to see the killer react a little more aggressively as the nights went on, setting more devious traps, removing items, or changing up your route through the house. As it stands, you only deal with increased security and bear traps littered around. While it’s nice to feel the initial mixup and reactivity as a consequence of getting caught, it ultimately just feels like a difficulty spike that’s less exciting and more punishing. Still, the game is brief enough that nothing overstays its welcome. As you progress some new enemies are thrown into the mix, which is just enough to maintain the pace until the end.
With small ways to proactively defend yourself like disarming traps, snipping wires on cameras, or even blasting away your attackers with precious bullets, you can always plan your motions through the house.
Giving players some agency outside of “run and hide” can go a long way to establishing a tense, immersive atmosphere that–within its scope–feels rich with choice and consequence. It’s easily enough to carry you to the end of Stay Out of the House, which even contains some surprising late-game additions to the formula to keep it fresh. There’s a surprising depth of interaction and reactivity on display here, and that only makes me more optimistic about what Puppet Combo has next for us.
Grounded by its dithered, retro pastiche, Stay Out of the House displays Puppet Combo firing on all cylinders. It retains that signature nostalgic style and soft jankiness we’ve come to love while delivering a fleshed-out, terrifying, and decidedly complete romp through a murder house rife with player choice, exploration, and hillbillies waiting to kill you.
Stay Out of the House is available one Steam , Xbox, and Playstation
