Uketsu – Strange Houses

Strange Houses has an interesting premise: our protagonists look at the floor plans of some house and realise that the whole thing feels off. It then continues to spiral out of control. The idea is interesting, but the execution is a bit weird. We begin in “there is a weird useless space” to “this is a murder house where an imprisoned child is forced to kill people and move their dismembered body to the storage room” in one chapter. It then turns out that they were not only right, but it gets even more convoluted.

It is a very short read. I’d say that at least 60 from 200 pages are used for floor plans, and most of them are useless. They will repeat with a circle around the part the characters talk about, to make sure that you’re following. Which feels a bit insulting, to be honest. I did find if funny though to see the homemade floor plan getting edited and drawn on by updating it as the characters talk. There was also a part where the characters read instructions written around 1950-ish only for the author to be like “in modern terms this means” and just paraphrase everything. Like, honestly dude, 1950 English/Japanese is not that impossible to understand so you need to write the same thing 2 times. You’re not Persona 5, or any JPRG really, you should know better.

I did like the ending, it at least made me feel that not everything has been pointless. The feeling of dread is also well done. It really falls apart when you realise that nothing will change: the characters are right from the beginning (somehow!), fully aware of how terrible and convoluted their ideas are (but never being like “hey maybe we should touch some grass?”) but the rest of the book will just give them proofs that, yes, indeed, they were absolutely right. No real mystery to solve, or horror to expand on. No real twists where the characters were wrong and need to adjust to new information, or anything. But hey, it’s only 150 pages long or so, since floor plans are taking up so much space, it was a solid 3/5 for me.

For the fun of it, I’ll add the paraphrasing at the end, but beware, it’s highly spoiler territory.