Inhabit

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Inhabit is a family-friendly character-based Puzzle game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players take the role of a lazy guy trying to work up the initiative to get up off his butt and be productive, with the anthropomorphized spirits of the household chores he needs to do cheering him on.

The presentation in Inhabit is adorable, with colorful pixel art visuals with hand-drawn character portraits backed by a decent but forgettable relaxed chiptune soundtrack. There’s nothing here truly outstanding, but it’s all welcoming and appealing regardless.

The gameplay itself features simple but different character-based puzzles for each of the different tasks. Gardening is essentially a Sokoban-style block-pushing Puzzle, housecleaning is a sliding Puzzle, lighting up the rooms in your house is a light and mirror reflection Puzzle, and so on. None of these is anything you haven’t seen in countless other games, and there’s little here that’s original or transformative, but at the very least there’s some decent variety.

I do have a few issues here. First, in the light reflection puzzle, grabbing mirrors requires holding down a button and spinning requires tapping it, but I repeatedly had issues with the game registering either command at times. Also, the game can be easily completed in under an hour, and the $5 price tag seems a bit high for a game so short and unambitious, especially when the PC version sells for $3.

In the end, I don’t think anyone is likely to be significantly upset with Inhabit, but neither do I expect that anyone will be thrilled with it. It’s cute, short, not particularly clever or original, but reasonably varied while it lasts. If you’re a Puzzle game fan and you can catch this game on sale, you may find it a decent time-waster, but beyond being a cute little distraction, it doesn’t have much to offer.

tl;dr – Inhabit is a family-friendly character-based Puzzle game that has players in different types of puzzles representing different household tasks. The presentation here is adorable, and the puzzles are nicely varied, but none of them is particularly new or exciting, and the game’s 1 hour length and unambitious design makes the $5 price tag seem a tad high. Puzzle fans may find this a decent distraction, but not a particularly memorable or long one.

Grade: C

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