Home sweet home – The imaginary house

“I, Herbert S. Sinclair, of the Mount Holly Estate at Reddington, do publish and declare this instrument my last will and testament…
… I give and bequeath to my grandnephew, Simon P. Jones, son of my dear niece Mary Matthew, all of my right, title, and interest in and to the house and land which I own near Mount Holly. The above provision and bequest is contingent on my aforementioned grandnephew discovering the location of the 46th room of my forty-five-room estate. The location of the room has been kept a secret from all the staff and servants of the manor, but I am confident that any heir worthy of the Sinclair legacy should have no trouble uncovering its whereabouts in a timely manner.…”

If you’ve opened the doors of Mount Holly Manor, you’ve had the opportunity to meet Herbert S. Sinclair and his famous legacy.

This article isn’t going to be about Blue Prince. Or at least, not as a puzzle game, but as a pretext for a different, perhaps more tortuous and even broader reflection. Yes, wider than Blue Prince, which I admit is a bit ambitious. All that to say one thing: you can go ahead without fear, there are no spoilers here about the adventure in Mount Holly manor, apart from references to certain rooms, which will serve here as a map for our tour of the house in the imagination and the video game.

In many ways, Blue Prince can serve as a starting point for reflection. A gateway to something else, to an expanse with many ramifications, from which we will choose a different version to explore each time. Each one will contain its share of mysteries, riddles and references, but they will all revolve around one and the same subject: the house. In Blue Prince, you have to find a paradox: room 46 in a mansion that only has 45 rooms. This mansion is in flux, resetting itself every morning, making you start almost from scratch every time. Almost, because you keep your memory, as well as the notes that you, the player, have taken in your previous advances. In many ways, the Blue Prince mansion is a character in its own right, a sort of boss with multiple phases and secrets that you have to uncover to defeat it. Or get through it.

The house of a thousand faces

Is there a difference between a story that takes place behind closed doors and one that takes place in a closed house? No. And yes, at the same time.

No, because the very definition of ‘huis clos’ refers to a closed place, an area (which may be open-air) within which the story unfolds, with no outside intervention, no escape to the outside world, in a kind of narrative prison that is this unity of place.

And at the same time, yes. Because the house, as such, is a very specific building. As a place to live, it’s familiar, reassuring, a place where you can feel safe (except in horror stories, of course, but we’ll come back to that later). It’s ours: we live there, we add familiar elements, we make it the vault of our memories, our habits, part of ourselves. The trauma of a burglary is not the same if it takes place in your workplace or directly in your home. In a way, your home is an extension of yourself, a reassuring and familiar place where the slightest change can have enormous repercussions.

This familiar cocoon quickly becomes the place for all sorts of extrapolations. From the adventure and science fiction of a TARDIS (bigger on the inside!), to the horror of a Layer of Fear mansion, there are so many possibilities with the house motif. And in every possible genre. Designers can play with the sense of security that emanates from a house, with the mystery of a labyrinth, with the secret revealed by a locked door. Depending on the medium, you can even play with the geometry of the space, non-Euclidean perspectives, doors opening onto the void, spaces between the walls, and so on. Each mutation can become the pretext for an emotion, for a great adventure.

In many ways, the house is the place of all mysteries, popularised in recent years by escape games, and before them by murder parties, horror films, haunted mansions and other fantastic tales. The house is everything at once: a place where everything can change, where everything is possible, a gigantic metaphor for what you want to put inside… or what will end up taking refuge there against your will.

Grow your own home

Because our imaginations are porous, mutually inspiring each other, seeking new resonance in tales, myths and legends. From the moving house, with the chicken legs of Baba Yaga (a Slavic mythological figure recently featured in Gaël Henry’s Terrible comic strip and in the Reka video game), to the very concept of Dofus’s haven-bag, a real space of time in a bag inside which you can design your own interior (reminiscent of Doctor Who’s TARDIS, by the way), the house is also at the origin of many cosy games. Even if, intuitively, the first thing that springs to mind is the haunted house, our cosy games about tidying up and organising – Animal Crossing in particular, but also Stardew Valley, for example – are all about reclaiming the house, making it your own again in a different way. Or to reclaim it, Unpacking-style, by arranging our own objects and our own story.

We could write a whole article on home improvement games. From the serious House Flipper to the more whimsical Animal Crossing Happy Home Paradise, several genres are taking over the house: simulators on the one hand and cosy games and other farm games on the other. For some, the house is the central element. For others, the house has several levels of interpretation. In the latest Fantasy Life, you can create two levels of ‘house’. Your interior on the one hand, an exclusive space, your home, with its restricted space and infinite possibilities. Your island, on the other hand, where you can also choose which villagers will come to live there, modifying your island according to your every whim… Yes, just like Animal Crossing New Horizon.

What’s interesting about this type of game is that the house extends to the outside. As well as having the interiority of a secret home, a personal and individual house, the outside spaces (which can be likened to a form of garden) invite you to socialise. Your villagers, whether in ACNH or Fantasy Life, will interact with you according to your own choices. They are the neighbours you have chosen, whose environment you have also controlled. Gardens therefore seem to be a form of transitional space, between the personal and intimate interiority of a house and the more sociable exteriority of an outdoor space.

If you go back to Blue Prince, you’ll find traces of this aspect: it’s in the greens rooms, gardens and other green spaces that you’ll find the most objects, forgotten there by the staff who have now left the premises. They are the remnants, the trace of a social life, of a presence in the house.

In itself, the symbolism of the garden is vast and encompasses many fields of study. The garden is closely associated with the tree, with taking root, with blossoming, with the cycle of life and death, with climbing plants towards the light, and so on. It moves slightly away from the symbolism of the house, while remaining closely linked to it. In the same way that there are strong contrasts between different uses of the house, growing a tree or greenery in a building can be seen as the intrusion of an outside force, a profound change taking place that gradually breaks down barriers, the beginning of a paradigm shift. This is illustrated by films such as Passengers, with its magnificent final scene in which vegetation takes on great importance in the aseptic spaceship; or Wall-E, with the contrasts created by the arrival of the square on the ship.

You have to cultivate your own garden, said Voltaire…

The house of a thousand puzzles

If there’s one thing that Blue Prince has taught us, it’s that every door hides a secret, an enigma or a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that you don’t yet have the whole picture of. So you pile up the pieces, the notes, try to remember all the little details, well aware that, perhaps, they will be necessary to understand everything.

Like other houses, Blue Prince takes the principle of the escape game and adapts it in a different way. Here, you don’t have to go outside, just go inside and find the missing piece. The house is a particularly good place for everything from enigmatic mechanics to environmental puzzles. You don’t need to create a setting: it’s already there. A kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, an office, a toilet – these are all rooms that already have a pool of essential objects. Could you even think of this room as a bathroom if it didn’t have a sink, a shower or any kind of water supply? I couldn’t possibly.

These everyday objects, already present in essence, form the basis of a setting on which to play. It’s easier to create puzzles on universal foundations. There’s no need to teach you how to flush a toilet, but to tell you that by doing so, the water will reveal a message, that’s when it all makes sense. The same goes for computers: today, you don’t need to be taught how to turn them on. But hide information behind one, and maybe two, passwords, and you’re touching the curiosity of your girlfriends.

If you look at escape games, whether they’re physical in your town, or flash-based as in the old days, you’ll see some constants: house (haunted or not), prison, secret room, museum, cemetery… Video games are also part of this trend. Closed doors reveal secrets, fascinating stories and new gameplay loops, despite the potential redundancy of the doors to be unlocked.

You can see them in the many games labelled ‘escape game’. Escape Academy plays on the different rooms of an office (the closest thing to a house in a large university). The excellent Agent A: A puzzle in disguise locks you into a sprawling house, the lair of a spy movie villain, with its secret rooms, radios and hidden mechanisms. Here, the house becomes a trap for your neurons and your thoughts.

Blue Prince is the complete opposite of the usual escape game. It’s a multi-layered puzzle, where the very placement of the places you visit becomes an element to be solved. How can I make a particular room appear? Can I trick the game? Can I bend or twist the rules? The aim is not to “break” the game but to test its contours, to try to play the developers as they play us.

Blue Prince isn’t the only one (to varying degrees, of course) to have fun with these blurred boundaries. Superliminal also did so in its time, leaving the door open to more “whimsical” ways of solving certain puzzles, or simply by slipping in winks that break the fourth wall. The whole balance lies in this famous wall. In this limit that some games impose on themselves to remain in the suggested meta reflection or in the total shattering of the fourth wall. Blue Prince uses meta-reflections in solving some of its puzzles, without breaking away from its narrative stance. You will always be Simon, the heir; your notes are his, his legacy yours. At no point, as in MiSide, are you the player embodying a character. And this example isn’t there by chance either: in MiSide, you’re a young man playing a date simulator, ending up embodying yourself in this virtual world. But how? That’s a mystery. The fact remains that you soon discover that this new house, in pixels and 2D, is going to turn out to be the heart of a labyrinth playing with the codes of video games, programming, horror and the use of the house as a sprawling liminal space, enclosing your worst nightmare behind some of its doors.

House horror?

Horror is a vast genre, with so many different variations. Psychological horror, body horror (link to Julien’s article), survival horror, zombie films or stories, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between horror and post-apocalyptic horror, so closely are certain creatures associated with horror (zombies, viruses, mutations, etc.) and present in apocalyptic imaginations. We could easily “invent” one of these multiple genres. Or at least name one: house horror.

If we oversimplify things, we could define it as follows: ‘body horror but with houses’. This would also require a definition of body horror, but for that I’d refer you to this excellent article. It would be a simplistic definition, admittedly, but quite explicit. We have seen that the home, with its intimate status, its extension of the self, its embodiment of a safe and personal space, is a particular vector for different types of story. But there is one in particular that flourishes here, and that is horror.

From Edgar Allan Poe to H.P. Lovecraft, all the classic authors through the ages have imagined these creaking walls populated by ghosts, whether gentle like Casper or simply terrifying. But once again, not just ghosts, but unspeakable creatures too.

Even more than classic authors, human beings have transformed the house into a terrifying space. The house of the murders of HH Holmes, history’s first serial killer, whose story served as the basis for the game Dark Pictures Anthology: A devil in me. If you’re not familiar with the story of Henry H. Holmes, you can quickly imagine: he was a man who had his house built by several architects, so that none of them had the final plans. He hid spaces between the walls, hid pipes to kill in different ways, passed himself off as dead at least once… Under the sensationalist impulse of the press of the time, Holmes’ house became a gigantic castle (although it was only a three-storey house, opened by Holmes under the pretext of being used as a small hotel during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893).

Behind the horror of the situation (and the chilling inventiveness with which he found ways to kill his victims) lies a profound irony: it was for insurance fraud, in the first place, and after years of activity, that Holmes was first locked up, before a thorough investigation revealed the terrible truth.

A number of books have been written about this incident, which gave rise to the term serial killer. Beyond the tragic story, it’s interesting to see the imaginary go beyond the fictional, the house being here too the tool of murderous impulses, the starting point, thereafter, of numerous stories and references (in Supernatural, but also in an episode of the series Sherlock).

Yes, but Blue Prince isn’t a horror game, you may ask. I’m in! I’m in!

Exploring Mount Holly Manor is a leisurely affair: apart from the riddles, closed doors and puzzle-like room layouts, it’s not intended to be a horrific place. Yet it’s easy to get caught up in the heavy atmosphere. The omnipresent silence, the sound of your footsteps, the occasional, almost atmospheric, musical note that catches you by surprise. There’s something eerie about wandering around these empty premises, at least the first time, discovering the security room and the implications of the surveillance cameras, for example. The Mount Holly mansion is filled with your own fears and insecurities. And that’s without taking into account the revelations of Alzara, the cryptic oracle whose words, staging and accompanying music add to the heaviness and ominousness of the moment.

There are plenty of horror games that fall into the category of what we call ‘house horror’. Layer of Fear plays on madness and the skewed perception of our environment, changing elements as you progress. Alone in the Dark was the first to use fixed cameras, imposing strange angles at times, but always effective in distilling Lovecraft’s unspeakable horror into its gameplay. So much so, in fact, that Resident Evil followed in its footsteps two years later. Even if it’s not a “house” in the sense that we understand it, Mouthwashing is also clearly part of this dynamic. Just because it’s a spaceship doesn’t mean it’s not a futuristic house, especially when you consider the game’s intense closed-door atmosphere!

As we said, the house becomes a character in its own right. We are the Pinocchio trapped in the belly of the whale of wood and tiles that are the houses in the various productions. Video games are not the only medium to offer house horror. How can we forget Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves? Danielewski’s House of Leaves? The house in which by Mariam Petrosyan? The hauting of hill house, whether in the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel or the Netlflix series? Or even… the real house in Amityville or the famous Winchester house, which was one of the inspirations for Blue Prince? Once again, these iconic buildings have a very special appeal to the imagination. You let your imagination wander behind these doors and windows, and the unknown becomes fascinating, sometimes horrifying, sometimes marvellous. After all, it was in a house, in a bedroom, that the famous wardrobe opened onto the world of Narnia.

The house horror genre is vast. It encompasses haunted houses, urbex explorations, anomaly games, stories that turn buildings into labyrinths, dreams and nightmares, childhood stories and monsters under the bed… the house plays a central role in these stories, as we have explored so far. But there’s one thing we haven’t touched on yet, an essential aspect of the symbolism of the house that we all know but haven’t necessarily put into words.

The house of our spirit…

It is often said that our body is the home of our mind. More specifically, our brain could be the labyrinth of our thoughts, the home of our personality, the seat of our deepest nightmares. Many works explore this metaphor. This is often the case in stories featuring characters suffering from some form of madness or mental pathology. This is the case, for example, in the 2003 film Identity, although the house is transformed into a motel. In video games, there’s also the short game Behind the Frame, set in an artist’s flat. Even more evocative is the setting seen in the Locke and Key comics, when the children use the spirit key. While the psyches of each character differ according to their character, they are often in the form of a house.

In What Remains of Edith Finch, the house is the repository of the family’s memories. Each room opens onto a universe, a piece of memory. A giant library in which each room reflects a member of the family. The game gives us the chance to embody and live a thousand lives, a thousand experiences, with each door opening onto another piece of family history. We move from individual memory, as in Lorelei and the laser eyes, to a family memory, a complete heritage.

In Lorelei and the laser eyes, the gigantic hotel, the tortuous mansion we explore, is a metaphor for memory and its loss. The place is ravaged by illness, by absences, by a memory that crumbles and disintegrates with age. In Lorelei and the laser eyes, the house is a spirit, the materialization of a brain eaten away by Alzheimer’s disease, with closed and padlocked doors that must be opened by dint of research and resolution to try to understand both what is happening and what the house itself represents (and if you’re curious, it’s over here). Several of the pieces echo this idea, whether it’s the tortuous paths in the gardens, split up to represent the disease, the character with the head of a maze, or simply the popular imagery likening the shape of a brain to that of a labyrinth.

Each piece reflects a different version of events: we wonder about what we are seeing, what we are going through. This motif of memory breaking down is also visible, in a much more distressing way, in Layer of Fear or in numerous games of anomalies, like Cabin Factory, which tell us a story through changes in the environment around us.

Congratulations, Simon P. Jones. Welcome to room 46.

A vector of stories, a character in its own right, a physical and metaphorical labyrinth, the house is a multiple entity whose limits have yet to be explored. Like the gigantic chasm opening up beneath La maison des feuilles, the house is omnipresent in the imagination. It even becomes a character in a dating game in the astonishing Building Relationships, where you take on the role of a house in search of a soul mate. The house has many rooms, each with its own special features.

Blue Prince has shown us the many possibilities, fascinating us with its depth, its multiple levels of reading and its narrative. In the end, finding room 46 is just the beginning of the exploration, the first layer of understanding of a narrative that unfolds in the bedrooms, boudoirs, wardrobes and other garages. Each element becomes significant, but we don’t yet understand its meaning. It is through exploration that light is shed, that the pieces of the jigsaw finally reveal their place or the overall picture they form.

It’s also through exploration and curiosity that we delve into the new layers of the motif of the house. Its familiarity is matched only by the changes it has undergone over the years and the productions it has produced. There is still much to discover and explore.

Like the house in Blue Prince, the house in the imagination still has closed doors that we haven’t opened, mysteries that we haven’t revealed.

So, if you were to walk through the door of one of these buildings, which one would it be?

Sources : 

• Librairie Mollat : Claro et Dominique Bordes présentent La Maison des Feuilles de Mark Z. Danielewski : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpe1NqT_27k 
• La manufacture du meurtre, d’Alexandra Midal chez Zones, 2018
• Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic, edited by Julius Greve Florian Zappe in palgrave macmillan
• Utopiales 2024 : Espace clos : https://www.actusf.com/detail-d-un-article/utopiales-2024-espace-clos 
• Imaginales 2023 : Les châteaux et l’imaginiare :  https://www.actusf.com/detail-d-un-article/imaginales-2023-les-ch%C3%A2teaux-et-limaginaire