Your House review: vintage comic art meets iPad innovation

Be warned, Your House features some devilishly tricky puzzles that will tax your brain, often the solution is just out of reach, in your peripheral, an itch that can't quite be scratched, but when you make the connections and find the solution that dopamine hit is unrivalled.

I came to Your House for the art, the Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez inspired illustrations, the kitsch 1960s comic art panels and deft 1990s-like indie fanzine graphic design, but stayed for some of the best puzzles and innovative use of the narrative game formula I've played in a long time. Yes, illustrator Jon Ander Torres' work immediately grabs me but its the game's design and narrative hook that keeps me coming back until that last secret is uncovered.

It all starts simply enough, with Debbie having a terrible 18^th birthday, having been expelled from school, discovering her boyfriend has cheated and on top of everything she's hit by a car. But as midnight draws in an innocent looking envelope lays on her bed, inside a key and an address. With nothing to lose, she ventures to the mysterious house in search of answers, but also Debbie just wants to put a shocking 18^th birthday behind her.

Your House is more than its art

After some splashy comic art, Your House begins to gradually show its layers – a clever mixture of tactile narrative puzzling and an inventive use of text and graphic design that peels away to reveal a story with just enough secrets and lies to keep me hooked.

Initially I played Your House somewhat passively, as you do with text adventures, reading and looking for a puzzle's solution. I soon realise the text itself can be a clue, the words themselves can be interacted with, prodded, swiped and explored to find new avenues to explore. Playing Your House, particularly on iPad, is a more active experience than text adventures generally impose.

The puzzles start logically and with some familiarity, using found items with objects in the house to unlock secret doors and documents. But soon these puzzles evolve in complexity and invention, you'll need to scribble down codes, link environmental details and in one moment even match the meows of cat statues to find audio clues. There's a moment when I found x-ray glasses that not only uncover secrets in the house, but illuminate clues in the text I'm re-reading. This is old-fashioned puzzle gaming where much of the fun happens off-screen in a notepad, as you piece together hints and ideas (and trust me, some puzzles need to be done this way).

Puzzles alone can't hold a game like Your House together for long, and this is more than an escape room, the story and smart writing will have you engaged, demanding you keep picking the iPad back up to try and solve that one tricky puzzle, because there's a twist to Debbie's story just out of reach.

Wrapping everything up is that art from Jon Ander Torres, which is beautifully rendered and perfectly captures the elegance of the period it seeks to evoke. Colour particularly is used nicely, to guide you towards clues as much as to evoke a sense of unease and mystery.

Developers Patrones & Escondites have described Your House as "a game you can read, or a book you can play", when we caught up with co-founder Daniel Calabuig. And this is the best way to view Your House, as a genre hopping experiment that seeks to find new ways to present the familiar.