Moving Houses review

It’s a well-known fact* that video games are made at least 39% better by having their own theme song. And while Moving Houses’ own theme song, which plays throughout the credits, is excellent, it’s not the most interesting thing about this game by a long shot.

The sole work of Gordon Little, working under the developer name Gord Games, Moving Houses posits itself as a cosy game about packing up boxes for a house move. And… it sort of is. It feels like Unpacking meets Moving Out… at least for the first 20 minutes or so. You’re simply making your way around a pleasant house, popping smaller items into boxes and chucking the larger ones straight into the back of the moving van.

It’s hard to talk about Moving Houses without spoiling it, but its Steam page description warning of “not all is as it seems” lets you know that… something is afoot here. Indeed, only when rooms start appearing in the house that you’re sure weren’t there before do you begin to suspect that everything is not okay. It’s entirely possible you missed the door to the bedroom, but there’s no way that staircase was there before.

It isn’t until more than half-way through the game that Moving Houses completely subverts your expectations and turns into something else. Even as new rooms start to appear you’re still just going about your business, packing up boxes and loading up the moving van. It would perhaps get boring fast if you didn’t know something was bubbling under the surface.

Moving Houses never goes full-on horror, which I’m thankful for, but it goes places you wouldn’t expect, in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, never fully sure of what’s going to happen. Gord Games makes use of a great number of horror tropes in inventive and unsettling ways.

You’ll find yourself moving through liminal spaces, and there’s of course the corridors that don’t seem to end. Even something as simple as the lights going out and being forced to use a flashlight is enough to break me out into a cold sweat.

This isn’t a very long game: you’ll be done with Moving Houses in around 90 minutes, give or take. But there’s an ‘Extra Packing’ version to play through when you’re done, which gives you more items to pack up in each room, along with a deleted scene to play through, which is a very neat touch indeed.

I could write more about Moving Houses, but this is the type of game that’s best played when you know as little as possible. Its twists and turns are designed to surprise you, and they hit much better if you play without fully knowing what to expect. No, nothing is as you’d expect in this cutesy moving sim, and that’s all you need to know. Oh, and it has one heck of an earworm for a theme tune.