The House That Remembers

You come back to the abandoned Trelawne house on a wet autumn night, years after the family vanished from it, to find out what happened.

A photograph on the mantelpiece. A child's music box upstairs. A diary in the study. Each one remembers. Touch one and the room you are standing in rearranges itself, around you, into the warm, lived-in version of itself from the night everything stopped — fire lit, lamps on, the family still there — and you walk around inside a memory that is still going.

What you find in the past is the only way to open what the present is still holding shut.

Playing it

Touch is only offered when you are standing close to something that remembers — the prompt tells you what it is and what E will do. A door you have not opened yet, a locked drawer, a keepsake. The house never hurts you and there is no timer. It only withholds.

The house

Two storeys and a basement, all walkable: entrance hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, study, the upstairs hallway, the child's bedroom, the basement — and one more room, walled off behind boards, that the drawings point at.

Every room exists twice: once as the abandoned present, cold and blue through rain-streaked glass under dust and cobwebs; once as the warm amber past, restored, with firelight and small shaded lamps and nothing out of place. The transition happens in place, around you, and the room's own light carries it.

The sequence it ships

Enter the house → explore the living room → find the family photograph → remember the room → find the brass key behind the piano, in the past → come back → unlock the sideboard drawer → read the child's drawing → go upstairs → find the child's bedroom → wind the music box → enter the second memory → find the drawing of the secret room → open what is behind it.

What is real here and what is not

This world is an honest partial build, and it is worth saying which parts are which so nobody is surprised.

Working, and verified by playing it: the house and its rooms; the objective chain, which advances off real state; the focus system, which picks what you are standing in front of and publishes it; and interaction — pressing E reaches the game's own control, finds the focused thing, calls it, and the door actually opens. Four sounds are generated and playing, including floor creaks that follow your footsteps. Both screens validate clean against the engine's own UI checker.

Not done: the house does not yet look like its reference images. Every furniture model and every surface — the floral wallpaper, the worn honey oak, the damp plaster, the threadbare wool — is still a flat colour or a block-out, and the full list of what replaces them is written down in design/spec.md and the polish notes. Ten of the game's sound cues have no audio yet. There are no first-person hands or torch. The memory transition, which is implemented, has never been driven end to end from the photograph; and the sequence past the second step has never been walked.

The design intent, the art direction every asset was specified against, and the reference images the finished game is held to all live under design/.