Spanish indie dev Patrones & Escondites explains how they were influenced by Ghost World and the 1990s fanzine style.
The story of Your House from Barcelona-based studio Patrones & Escondites acts as a prequel to the studio’s 2020 game Unmemory, following the life of teenager Debbie Steinbecker before she joins the all-girl gang Killer Kittens.
Debbie is having a terrible 18th birthday: she’s been expelled from school, betrayed by her boyfriend and hit by a car. But at midnight she finds a mysterious envelope on her bed containing a key and an address. What follows is a mixture of clever, tactile narrative puzzle-solving as Debbie investigates a strange house and tries to find out who sent her there.
Your House is a game that bucks the trend for photorealism, as seen in upcoming indie game Among the Trolls and a push to use Unreal Engine 5 in everything, and instead embraces a novel yet impactful vintage comic book aesthetic that blends the formats of puzzling and the comfort of a classic novella, albeit one that's inventively interactive. Filled with clever design ideas as well as elegant art, Your House is a creative masterclass that makes how you read words both a puzzle and an artistic experiment.
(Image credit: Patrones & Escondites)
“It's difficult to put Your House or Unmemory into a category,” muses Patrones & Escondites co-founder Daniel Calabuig. “We finally came up with the tagline ‘This is a game you can read, or a book you can play’. Our idea from the very beginning was to try to push forward what the book is as a technology. The book is a very old technology that has evolved very little all these years, whereas other technologies like the phone, which is younger, have evolved much more. We wanted to see how we could push that technology a little bit further.”
The inspiration for the house at the centre of the game came from a real-life story that happened in New York around 20 years ago. “A rich Wall Street broker asked a famous architect called Eric Clough to renovate a beautiful apartment in Manhattan,” Daniel says. But unbeknownst to his client, Eric did much more than knock through some walls: he packed the flat with a series of obscure ciphers and puzzles, which it took the client and his family weeks to solve. Part of the finale involved removing specific door knockers and joining them together to form a crank, which could be used to open a hidden panel, in turn revealing a sequence of keyholes.
The vintage illustration of Your House
The art by Jon Ander Torres is a visual callback to the 1950s and 1960s. (Image credit: Patrones & Escondites)
Whereas Unmemory employed live-action video and photographs, Your House has a completely different, comic-book art style, which Daniel says takes inspiration from comic artists like Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Charles Burns (Black Hole) and Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets). (Read our list of the comic book artists everyone should know for more inspiration.)
“They all started with doing fanzines, and that's something that we wanted to bring into the style,” Daniel says. “We use a very limited colour palette, and whenever we need to do shading, we use a pattern. That's something these artists used to do because they didn't have money to print with a lot of colours.”
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“Another thing that we wanted to bring in is that paper texture,” he continues, going back to the idea of a book you can play. Rather than something digital, 3D and high-resolution, Daniel says they wanted to make something that felt crafted, “as if you can touch it”.
The switch away from video and photos was also pragmatic. “We discovered on Unmemory that using photographs was very appealing to the eye, but production-wise, it wasn't a clever choice, because whenever you needed to change anything, it was kind of expensive,” Daniel explains. “So that's why we pivoted towards this comic look and feel.”
The game plays into its vintage influences, and includes a 'Viewmaster' that holds some clues. (Image credit: Patrones & Escondites)
That pragmatic approach extends to the structure of Patrones & Escondites itself, which operates more like a movie studio than a game developer. The company is solely made up of Daniel and co-founder Beatriz Osorio, but for each game they make, starting with their debut Unmemory, they assemble a small team, just like putting together a film crew. “So every game has a different artist, different developer,” explains Beatriz.
The story always comes first: Daniel comes up with the ideas and scripts, then the pair decide on which game mechanic would best suit the narrative. Beatriz, meanwhile, acts as a producer, gathering together the money and managing the team, as well as making “deadlines that they never follow,” she chuckles.
The slimmed-down structure makes financial sense in terms of the cyclical nature of the games industry. “We know that it might be wiser to be a very small team and grow whenever you have work to be done, and then when that work has finished, you go down again to be the smallest team possible,” Daniel says.
It also means that Daniel and Beatriz have the freedom to search out the artists who they think are the exact fit for each particular idea. For Your House, they brought in Ferran Gost as art director, who previously worked with them on Unmemory, as well as the illustrator Jon Ander Torres. Programmer Thierry Renaudcame up with the framework for the game in Unity, using a plugin called TextMesh Pro to handle things like text formatting.
The power of… Excel spreadsheets
Your House features interactive text that makes reading an active experience. (Image credit: Patrones & Escondites)
But one issue with the studio’s movie-like workflow is the lack of standardised tools for this kind of thing, says Daniel. “In the movie industry, they use one tool, which is the storyboard,” he says, noting that it’s utilised and understood by everyone from the director to the scriptwriter to the costume designer. But there’s no real equivalent for the games industry.
Instead, Patrones & Escondites has been relying on shared Excel spreadsheets: which works, but is far from ideal. “We need something a little bit more visual,” Daniel sighs. It’s a gap in the market that’s waiting to be filled: especially as there are signs that big-budget games are now shifting towards a multi-studio co-development model and away from the endless cycles of mass hiring and firing.
