Inhabit sees you making small steps toward self-care, steadily cleaning up your house and the surrounding area by doing charming little puzzles.
CONTENT WARNING: MENTAL HEALTH
You’ve been neglecting yourself and your home for a while. Today, you feel good enough to try to make a few small changes to feel better, though. That starts with letting some sun into the house. Now, you’d think that would be as simple as opening a window, but brightening things up involves guiding light around the house using mirrors. In fact, most of the things you’ll do around the house require you to solve some sort of puzzle to do. Not that the puzzles are extremely hard to figure out, but they’ll still keep you busy for a while. So, it’s even more understandable why the protagonist wouldn’t want to do any of this stuff.
Still, as you slowly tidy things up and let in the light, you start feeling more comfortable having your wonderful, supportive friends around. You have an array of pals that are manifestations of the chores. Completed chores that turn into charming people who are just fun to talk to and hang around? I might actually get around to cleaning up the basement if that was the case. While most games would give you items or some collectible for doing your work, having new buddies to talk with is a far better reward for keeping up with the housework. They really are a delightful gang to speak with, and bring a tangible warmth to the game as you play.
Connecting the player with people as they complete their chore puzzles is a beautiful message of how these tiny steps can bring lovely things to our lives, even when they feel hard to do. While it can feel impossible to get anything done, taking a single step toward improving your existence can lead to great things. And besides, most of you probably don’t have to do light, guiding puzzles to let in some sun. I hope.
Inhabit is available now on Steam.