House, the cult classic indie horror hit from a few years ago, is getting a sequel with House 2 via Bark Bark Games. It doesn’t yet have a release date, but it has a trailer and you can wishlist it on Steam.

What exactly is House about? While the original is a cult classic, it is far outside of the much-treaded road of mascot horror that is so popular with streamers and gen alpha kids, so it is no surprise the game flew under most gamer’s radar. The plot of the game itself is very lore-heavy. I don’t want to ruin any of the twists, so instead I’ll give a general idea about the kind of fears underlining this series.

If someone were to tell you that you there was a strong likelihood of death within the next year, what would you guess would be the cause of that death? A car crash? That would be a good guess. Hundreds of thousands die globally every year from car crashes. How about cancer? This would be another good guess.

Just from lung cancer (mostly caused by smoking) more than eight million people die a year, with more than one million of these deaths being people who didn’t smoke at all, but who were exposed to secondhand smoke.

If you consider the fact that this number more or less repeats every year, then this means that far more people have died and will die because of smoking than people who died or will die because of covid.

Alright, but let’s say you keep confined to your house and aren’t driving around so much and don’t smoke and are not living with a smoker. Do you live in a house that was constructed a few decades ago? Better make sure it doesn’t have asbestos in the walls, hire a professional for that.

In just the United States alone, 1,290 people die per year from Asbestos exposure, which can include perfectly healthy, fit young adults. While asbestos is going to be phased out completely by 2037 due to an EPA ruling, that still allows 13 years for you to die before the ruling comes into effect, and that’s assuming that the decision isn’t overturned by a future administration or judge.

How about food? Obesity-related illnesses have been proven to eventually cause millions of deaths per year globally. Are you stuffing up on desserts, soda and crappy pork products? You’re probably on the road to obesity and all the sickness that springs from have obesity. If on the other hand you have a balanced diet and try to only eat organic food, you have a much better shot at staying healthy.

There are many other ways to die too, but these are some of the most common ones. I didn’t even go into murder, of which there are 48,000-thousand-gun deaths in just America every year. I couldn’t find knife death statistics but you get the point. In House, some of the deaths I outlined above you will experience, plus many more.

House is a game that taps into many of these fears. From domestic violence to falling chandeliers, from evil lurking in the walls to death in the plumbing, there are many ways to die while playing for the innocent heroine Tabby. Hopefully, she and her little sister will be able to survive House 2 just as they survived the original House. Here’s a trailer:

The first House has been available for Windows PC (via Steam) since 2020 and on consoles since March 2024.