You Wake Up in a Room, encaged. You've been kidnapped and taken to the dilapidated home of a Serial Killer. Use your wits to escape!
It also has a 20-minute prequel game called Night Shift, which details how one of his victims ended up in his house.
Initially released in 2018 on Puppet Combo's website, Stay Out of the House were released in October 13th, 2022 on Steam, with Night Shift incorporated into it as the first chapter of the game. A console release for contemporary Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo consoles was released on June 16th, 2023.
Has a character page here.
The game provides examples of:
- The '80s: As is usual for Puppet Combo, the game takes place in this decade (presumably in 1986, if the newspaper depicting the space shuttle Challenger disaster is of any indication).
- The Brute / Evil Is Bigger: The killer is huge. The newspaper article about the "Night Shift Abductor" says the police estimate him as being 6'4" and 250 pounds, which is about the same size as Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
- The Butcher: The Night Shift Abductor, he carries a cleaver, wears a blood-soaked smock, and chops up human bodies like livestock. Although as an interesting twist to the Slasher Butcher formula is that he surprisingly isn't a cannibal. He's just preparing the human meat to feed some sort of demonic entity in a bunker in his basement.
- Captain Ersatz: The killer is exactly like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He's a gigantic serial killer who kidnaps his victims, imprisons them in his home, and prepares them for dinner like a butcher. He's also incapable of speech and wears a brown mask and a leather apron.
- Chainsaw Good: The Butcher attacks you with a chainsaw in the finales of when you escape through the front door or start a meltdown in the bunker.
- Continuing is Painful: If the Butcher catches you, you'll lose all the bullets and paperclips you found (and can't get them back) and will have to re-acquire your inventory items. Slightly less painful in the bunker, where you retain your bullets/paperclips and your items can be found right next to where you wake up.
- Decoy Protagonist: The protagonist of Night Shift isn't the protagonist of Stay Out of the House, but rather simply one of the Butcher's victims.
- Downer Ending: All 4 endings to Stay Out of the House end badly for the protagonist. She either gets sacrificed by the Butcher, discovers a demonic entity in the bunker in the basement and gets fed to it, manages to escape out the front door and run to a nearby trailer park only to discover that the creepy customer from Night Shift is one of the Butcher's neighbors, just as some sort of parasite implanted in her when she was captured bursts out of her, or escapes through the Bunker and wakes up in a hospital, only for said parasite baby to burst out of her while she's recuperating, causing her to black out and wake up in an infested version of the hospital.
- Dumb Muscle: A note you find from a dead survivor notes that the killer is insanely strong but not very intelligent, noting that he seems to forget things after a few hours, which accounts for why he stops searching for you after a while if you manage to evade him.
- Dungeon Bypass: The Butcher carries a master key on his hip that can be used to skip straight to the endgame if you can manage to pickpocket it off him.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: None of the endings are "good", but the one ending in which there's at least a possibility the protagonist survived is the most difficult to get, as instead of escaping out the front door, you need to escape through the bunker which is a whole additional chapter. You also need to go through a complex process to meltdown the bunker's nuclear reactor, instead of just going down the Butcher's feeding corridor to meet his master.
- Evil Old Folks: The killer's ancient, almost corpse-like mother roams the house in a motorized wheelchair and will summon her son with a shriek if she spots you. Once you find the revolver, you can put a bullet in her head to finally get rid of her, though this may make the Butcher more aggressive in roaming the house.
- Government Conspiracy: The House turns out to be built on top of an abandoned top secret government bunker where some sort of human experimentation was taking place, with the implication the Butcher is a byproduct of said experimentation. At the core of the bunker is some sort of demonic insect-like entity that the researchers apparently created. An Almost Dead Guy you meet in the bunker urges you to overload the nuclear reactor to kill the "demon" and destroy the remnants of the unethical research.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The killer abducts victims to butcher their corpses and presumably eat them. Subverted however when it turns out that he's feeding some sort of demonic entity in a bunker in his basement.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: You can only carry 5 items at a time, which isn't nearly enough to carry all the tools you need to navigate the house (screwdriver to open vents and disarm bear traps, hammer to open boarded up doors, wirecutters to cut trap wires, etc.) as well as defensive items needed to deal with the Butcher (i.e. the revolver, the radar, etc.) You can find a backpack in a locked cupboard which increases your inventory to 8, once you get the hex key to pick locks.
- Made of Iron: Like most Puppet Combo slashers, bullets are only an inconvenience to the Butcher. A couple shots from a revolver will scare him off, but nothing will kill him.
- Non-Standard Game Over:
- Being caught 3 times by the Butcher results in the "Sacrifice" ending, in which player is sacrificed by the Butcher in some sort of ritual.
- The "Rebirth" ending is essentially this; if, while in the bunker, you go to find out where the Butcher is carting all his meat, you'll end up being knocked out by him and fed to the creature he's been feeding.
- Resources Management Gameplay: You have a very limited number of bullets, paperclips, and bandages, which are all hidden around the house usually in drawers; you need bullets to drive off the Butcher if he spots you, paperclips to open simple locks, and bandages to heal from damage. The VHS tapes that you need to save the game are also very limited.
- Sackhead Slasher: The killer wears a burlap sack on his head.
- Shared Universe: The presence of the CFV ("Church of Father's Vision") ties the game to The Nun Massacre and Feed Me Billy. In particular, the creature in the bunker the Butcher is feeding with his victims is conceptually very similar to the creature that serial killer Billy is feeding. The preacher on the TVs is also apparently the same preacher that speaks to Billy on the phone.
- Smarter Than You Look: The killer fluctuates between this and Dumb Muscle. On the one hand, something is clearly wrong with him mentally, as he seems to have some kind of memory handicap and also the only speech he's capable of is incoherent screaming. His diary shows his mental state gradually degenerating to a simpler and more incoherent level, but said diary also shows he's smart enough to target people who are isolated from society and thus easier to grab (such as gas station attendants), and he's also rigged his house with a variety of effective traps and security measures. The fact he's apparently got a parasite nestled in his brain may account for his degenerated mental state.
- Tap on the Head: The Abductor never actually tries to kill the player, simply knocking them out with a hammer so they can be re-captured. Although this changes if you get caught at least three times.
- Uncertain Doom:
- It's unclear whether the protagonist of Night Shift is one of the 4 hostages you can rescue, or has already been killed and eaten or is one of the many corpses laying around. Leading the hostages to the safe room will cause them to tell you their names. Debra is indeed one of them, the blonde girl in the red shirt.
- "Saving" the hostages just involves leading them to the safe room. There's no indication what happens to them afterwards, especially in the "Escape the Bunker" ending in which you set off a nuclear meltdown in the bunker underneath the house.
