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rynlingRental
https://smarto-club.itch.io/rental
With the spooky season upon us, Smarto Club decided to take a break from being wholesome and turned spooky with Rental, an eerie game about the risks of renting beach houses.
Rental is a 32-bit game about a family of cute bunnies who rent a vacation house in the woods. This isn’t a horror game, necessarily, but it’s strange and lowkey creepy. I’m going to say it takes about fifteen minutes to play, although it might take longer for people who are out of practice with PlayStation One style 3D spatial navigation (such as myself).
As the daughter of the bunny family, your job is to walk through the house and collect objects. The twist is that there are House of Leaves shenanigans going on. The first half of the game takes place aboveground, while the second half is more of an adventure. There’s a shadow monster in the house with you, but its appearance seems to be random. I only saw it once, briefly, during my second playthrough, and it wasn’t a big deal. Rental is more atmospheric than scary, and most of the atmosphere has to do with the ambient music and the oddness of the scenario.
Rental works well as analog horror. The graphics and gameplay and washed-out colors feel super outdated, as do the Hello Kitty character designs. There’s also the combination of the nostalgic childhood experience of going on vacation with the childhood discomfort of trying to settle into an unknown place. The house you’re exploring has a standard layout and floorplan, and the girl often comments on how normal and unremarkable everything is, which adds to the sense of the uncanny.
The Christian religious icons the girl has to gather are also totally normal (I think). For me, this created an extra layer of resonance in the sense of going to a mundane place with a lot of Christian art and imagery and feeling that everything is slightly weird about the oddly suffering men and oddly beatific women and oddly mature babies. I appreciate the girl’s no-nonsense attitude toward everything, which makes the ending all the more amusing. Nothing bad happens; I just enjoyed the dry sarcasm.
There are no jumpscares in this game, and it’s not challenging. Probably the best way to describe Rental is to say that it's a short but spooky treat for connoisseurs of perfectly normal houses that are ever so slightly larger on the inside.
https://smarto-club.itch.io/rental
With the spooky season upon us, Smarto Club decided to take a break from being wholesome and turned spooky with Rental, an eerie game about the risks of renting beach houses.
Rental is a 32-bit game about a family of cute bunnies who rent a vacation house in the woods. This isn’t a horror game, necessarily, but it’s strange and lowkey creepy. I’m going to say it takes about fifteen minutes to play, although it might take longer for people who are out of practice with PlayStation One style 3D spatial navigation (such as myself).
As the daughter of the bunny family, your job is to walk through the house and collect objects. The twist is that there are House of Leaves shenanigans going on. The first half of the game takes place aboveground, while the second half is more of an adventure. There’s a shadow monster in the house with you, but its appearance seems to be random. I only saw it once, briefly, during my second playthrough, and it wasn’t a big deal. Rental is more atmospheric than scary, and most of the atmosphere has to do with the ambient music and the oddness of the scenario.
Rental works well as analog horror. The graphics and gameplay and washed-out colors feel super outdated, as do the Hello Kitty character designs. There’s also the combination of the nostalgic childhood experience of going on vacation with the childhood discomfort of trying to settle into an unknown place. The house you’re exploring has a standard layout and floorplan, and the girl often comments on how normal and unremarkable everything is, which adds to the sense of the uncanny.
The Christian religious icons the girl has to gather are also totally normal (I think). For me, this created an extra layer of resonance in the sense of going to a mundane place with a lot of Christian art and imagery and feeling that everything is slightly weird about the oddly suffering men and oddly beatific women and oddly mature babies. I appreciate the girl’s no-nonsense attitude toward everything, which makes the ending all the more amusing. Nothing bad happens; I just enjoyed the dry sarcasm.
There are no jumpscares in this game, and it’s not challenging. Probably the best way to describe Rental is to say that it's a short but spooky treat for connoisseurs of perfectly normal houses that are ever so slightly larger on the inside.
