Image: Gabriel Helfenstein & Fantasia Malware

It's always great to discover something completely unique when browsing Next Fest demos... Well, usually. I'm still processing my time with the demo of The House Before, and it has left me feeling weird, sticky, and utterly alienated. Which is probably what it was going for. So, well done, Gabriel Helfenstein. It's a surreal body horror experience seen through esoteric interfaces, about waking up one day to discover that you are a vast, impossible House. Home to strange creatures, and barely comprehending your own existence.

So, not a laugh-a-minute experience, then. And yet I still want to see where this weird story goes, and how it can possibly end, so I guess the demo was a success. The demo opens with you finding that you can literally turn the cogs of your own mind, searching for the idea to USE an ARM.

But you have no arm. Let alone a mouth, and there's no button to scream here.

What you do have is an eye, mounted on a rail-cart, which you can semi-loosely direct around parts of your own internals, albeit only turning clockwise, finding strange and talkative creatures, one of which claims to be the one in charge of making sure you do your job correctly, unlike the previous soul of the house. There have apparently been many like you. You can speak with them, too.

And then you get into the fourth-dimensional shenanigans, as you shift through eras of your own body's past, altering the very reality of your existence. Until one of your inhabitants asks you to knock that off, because they liked their reality where it was, thank you very much. And you wouldn't want to be a bad house, would you?

This one is just fascinating. The game's aesthetics switch on a dime from Giger- and Beksinski-inspired bio-horror to whimsical neon rendercore, and it looks like there are a few other interface styles to be explored in the full game.

I don't expect this to be a massive experience in the end (the store page mentions it should be around two hours), but I have a gut feeling that there's going to be layers and secrets to this, and the possibility of multiple endings. But again, that's just me feeling things out and working from assumptions. I won't know until I feel around the full game for myself.

The House Before launches on November 3rd, but you can get your first feel around in your own guts via the demo now.