horror rpg guide
The Witch's House
is a freeware puzzle-oriented horror game by the Japanese game creator Fummy (ふみー), created using the software, RPG Maker VX. The game was first released in October 2012, for Windows and Mac.
Viola wakes up in the middle of a forest, and soon discovers that her only way out of the forest is completely blocked off by roses. Her only option is to enter a mysterious house nearby (the Witch's House) in hopes of finding some means of escaping. Accompanied by a black cat, Viola must try to survive this magical and dangerous house.
As soon as Viola enters the house, seemingly consisting of two rooms, there will be a note reading, "COME TO MY ROOM." Afterward, the house will transform into the entire first floor, and Viola's adventure will begin. She has no other option than to obey the message, as the house has been locked at this point.
As Viola explores this house, she finds scattered diary entries made by the resident of the house, who is later recognized as a witch. It talks of a witch, named Ellen, and her deadly illness and neglect as a child, which prompted her to X her parents and become a witch upon forming a contract with a demon. The demon promised her that if she X more people and let him eat their souls, the demon would give Ellen a cure for her illness.
Throughout the house, Viola is forced to make cruel decisions in order to progress. This includes cutting the limbs off a teddy bear, feeding a friendly frog to a snake, and X a beautiful flower. Once Viola reaches the Medicine Room on the 5th Floor, she is able to obtain the Cute Little Bottle, which is able to destroy the witch's roses.
Gameplay
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The game is a survival horror game in which the main goal is to solve all puzzles correctly and escape the witch's house. It contains a creepy atmosphere, complex riddles and jump scares. This game is played from bird's-eye view using ornate 16-bit graphics, and controlled via keyboard.
A black, talking cat can be met at various places in the house, serving as a save point, as well as something of a companion. Throughout the vast majority of the game, the cat is the only source of conversation, usually talking in a casual, nonchalant manner.
Characters
Viola
is one of the main characters in The Witch's House, and the protagonist.
She befriends Ellen, a young girl who was also the witch of the house. She's deceived by Ellen into switching bodies, weak and sick, with the promise of "just for a day." In the end, however, they never switched their bodies again, since Ellen enjoys her new painless body. Viola unfortunately dies in Ellen's body, shot by her own father, thinking it is a monster in the Normal Ending of the game.
ellen
is one of the main characters of the The Witch's House and the titular protagonist of The Diary of Ellen novella.
Originally from the slums of a medieval time, Ellen was born with a curse which took the form of an incurable, terminal illness which caused her to be shunned by society. Being part of an increasingly dysfunctional family, she was strongly attached to her mother while she desperately sought her father’s affection. After an incident involving burying a black cat and subsequently failing to keep her family together, Ellen killed her mother for apparently abandoning her as well as her father for ignoring her to the bitter end, orphaning herself and inadvertently burning her own house in the process.
Having nowhere to go, Ellen opted to pass away in a dark alley outside her former home, the Demon offered her a contract which she accepted, unaware of what she got herself into as well as ignorantly accepting her sickness to be cured in the process. Upon realization that it still progressed inside of her, that she had been deceived and lied to, Ellen was reborn as a Witch. With this notion, she callously murdered various individuals, mostly children around her age, with the ultimate intention of finding a spell to cure her illness.
In the end, she was given a body switching spell, instead, befriending Viola in the process with the intention of stealing her body under the false promise that it would be “just for a day” while she was in her death bed, ultimately staying within the unfortunate girl’s body while leaving her to die in her former one.
It is revealed in the True Ending that Ellen was, in fact, inside Viola's body the entire time, that she was the player character within Viola's body and that the real Viola attempted to use the very magic Ellen used on her to trap her within her own house.