Indie horror games with PS1-style graphics are becoming abundant these days, and some don't have any substance or meaning. The game "I live under your house" begins with the player traversing underground tunnels as a mysterious creature—or person. The mystery character's thoughts drive the narrative. A green filter surrounds the entire game, giving it the appearance of an original GameBoy LCD.

The low resolution/low polygonal visuals and short draw distance help to add dread and tension without having to actually create it. You invade the house you are living in, but I can't spoil anything. Let's just say the ambient music and sound effects add a lot of tension. There are no jump scares or cheap thrills here. The game doesn't need it. The game's haunting visuals and atmosphere leave you yearning for more dialogue. Whenever the character speaks, I just hold my breath, expecting something to happen. Each chapter only takes a few minutes to complete, but each location you end up at is just as intense as the last.

I will talk about the story DLC. It's only $1 and is much better than the main game. It adds two new chapters to the game and seriously increases the sense of claustraphobia. There are fewer 2D dialogue-heavy scenes and more 3D exploration. The DLC is short but also incredibly intense and answers a lot of questions from the base game. The DLC chapters have better writing and storytelling, so you get a better idea of your surroundings, and the severe sense of dread the main character is feeling comes across strongly.

Overall, I Live Under Your House is a very short but intense horror game with PS1-style visuals, haunting ambient music, and atmosphere. There are some disturbing images and scenes that can really get under your skin. This is a perfect game to play with all of the lights off and headphones on.

Surrealism is something that The Dream Machine does well. The Dream Machine masterfully crafts an otherworldly art style that is both familiar and dream-like. It's the best part about the game, which also took 7 years to make. The first two chapters were released all the way back in 2010—14 years ago. It took 7 years to develop the following 4 chapters. This game might hold the record for the longest time between episodic content. Imagine having to wait nearly three years for a single chapter. The longest gap was in getting the final chapter out the door. While this was only a two-man team behind the game, I can't fault it too much for its release schedule. Regrettably, akin to numerous point-and-click experiences, the game is rife with incomprehensible puzzles and ambiguous objectives that impede its progress throughout.

I highly recommend playing this for the first time with a guide. There are just too many obscure objectives you need to complete to get through the game without hours of backtracking and guessing. There are some context clues, such as when you solve a physical puzzle together, Victor will indicate if it was successful or not. However, the game heavily relies on gathering items, determining their direction, and determining if they are related. The game's premise is about a single couple expecting their first child and renting a new apartment in a new town—a fresh start. They end up discovering a strange secret their building holds, and Victor is now transcending reality and entering dreams.

Through each chapter, you will enter another tenant's dream, and some of the puzzles are about how to get to these tenants. You travel between areas, examine everything you can, and figure out which items go where and who to talk to. Towards the end of the game, you end up entangled in dialog trees that are required to trigger certain events. In this game, talking and exhausting all dialog options is a must, or you will end up stuck, not knowing where to go. It could simply be a dialog option you forgot to click on. Certain items in this game don't function as they would in the real world due to its abstract logic. This can lead to serious frustration and roadblocks along the way, but I always play point-and-click adventure titles with guides first, and then if I like the story enough, I will go back through it again alone. While some are fun to figure out by yourself, others, like this game, can be a convoluted mess. Clicking on everything and guessing with so many areas and objects is just a recipe for disaster.

The visuals, ambient music, and sound are what really kept me playing. While the story itself is a theoretical tale of dreams, life, death, and rebirth, the surreal visuals that move from recognizeable everyday objects and locations to pure dream-like states of pure consciousness are a treat to look at. The hand-modeled backgrounds made out of real-world objects are a joy to look at. The music is haunting and mesmerizing, and it will occasionally invoke feelings of nostalgia for a long-distant memory as a child and innocent years of a simpler time. Each location effectively balances the game's light and dark elements.

The overall story isn't anything that will stick with you, but it's still well done, has a conclusive ending, and is thought-provoking for at least a little bit. The game's visuals will remain in my memory far longer than any character names or the story itself. The Dream Machine demonstrates a clear dedication to both visual arts and sound design. While there are better adventure titles out there, gameplay-wise, there's no denying that this is a game that every fan of the genre needs to experience.

A game based on the short story by Harlan Ellison sees a group of five people trapped inside some sort of digital hellscape. They have been there for over 100 years and want to escape; however, the all-powerful and overseeing AI called AM is trying to stop them. The short tales of these five individuals, with almost no backstory, thrust us directly into their lives. We don't understand their motivations for being here, and we barely get to know who or what AM is. I Have No Mouth is another adventure title from Cyberdreams that focuses more on the atmosphere, art, and voice acting than on gameplay.

I Have No Mouth is jam-packed with puzzles, items for your inventory, and a variety of ways to utilize them. I recommend following a guide to a T to get an idea of how the game plays out first, but even with the guide, I was confused and lost. Each scenario has multiple endings, and getting the totem at the end of each scenario requires a perfect playthrough. These roadblocks will either just end the scenario, resulting in that character not being able to act in the final scene, or end the entire game. This will necessitate constant trial and error and backtracking, which can be incredibly frustrating. Who would want to do this? This open-endedness is the wrong way to get different endings.

Even within each scenario, combining objects and using them in the correct order is mostly impossible without a guide. Unless you spend dozens of hours trying things in different ways, you will never get far. Some puzzles are extremely obtuse, and even with a guide, I constantly reminded myself that I would never have guessed to solve them. Using certain objects in a particular manner simply doesn't make sense. You can't use a cloth as a blindfold to bypass a specific character. How would I have known that? Adventure games from the early to mid-1990s faced numerous issues, which are evident in I Have No Mouth.

If you do use a guide, the scenarios are quite interesting and play a part in the morality and perspective of both good and bad people. The artwork and music are amazing, with a lot of detail put into the atmosphere. Each scenario looks and feels different, but I wanted to know more about AM and why these characters are here. There's not much of an explanation for any of this. Each scenario is also very short. You can complete the entire game with a guide in less than 2 hours. I also feel that for the amount of trial and error the game has, there are too many actions you can use. Swallow, give, take, push, use, talk to, walk to—it's just way too much. It becomes tedious to use nearly every command on each object. It's simply not fun at all.

Overall, I Have No Mouth is an interesting spin on moral choices, but there's no overarching story here to keep you wanting more. The characters also have no backstory, and I wanted to know more about AM and what this hellscape is all about. The game has way too many actions, trial-and-error roadblock endings, and just a bad case of 90's adventure qualms. I Have No Mouth is largely overrated as a game, and there are other adventure titles that offer more striking visuals. If you need to use a guide just to finish the game, then you know there's a problem. Good voice acting and music aside, there's just too much that will make a player quit early on.