Developed by Andrew Morrish and published by The Arcade Crew and Dotemu, Bad House is an auto-battler dungeon-crawler where you step into the shoes of a character who has just purchased a brand-new house but receives a basement full of never-ending dungeons and monsters. When you say auto-battler, it is exactly what you expect from the title. The characters fight on their own, and you are left with clicking on dungeon doors and placing items from your inventory to be used in combat. However, behind the highly automated combat, there is still a lot of strategy and skill required in Bad House that will allow you to survive and explore the deepest dungeon in the game. This is our preview of Bad House on PC via Steam, in which we explore a vast network of dungeons in our basement and try to kill as many monsters as possible.
Auto-battlers are not really my field of interest, and if I remember it correctly, I have never played any sort of auto-battler in my life previously. This changed, however, when I received a preview code for Bad House, and I finally decided to give this genre a shot. My initial few minutes were not as interesting or entertaining, as I found the concept of the character fighting and defeating enemies on its own pointless. However, my first death intrigued me to try again, and this time I tried to manage my items properly, and when I finally defeated my boss, I was actually hooked on the title to the point that I managed to spend an unhealthy amount of time in the game just for this preview. While I will acknowledge that I also killed quite a large number of Blakes to get a grip on the mechanics, my final Blake was a ruthless killing machine.
Bad House kicked off with a cutscene of a strangely looking fellow handing me a key to my new house that I had apparently purchased from some other weird fellow. The ‘broker’ told me to avoid going into the basement, but naturally, it was the first thing that I did as soon as I got control of my character. The demo offered me a selection of one character at the start, named Blake by default. There were other options as well, but I never got to try them out, so I am not sure if they were unlockable in this demo or not. My first ever Blake was named after my nickname, but once I figured out that death is permanent, I just kept their names to a default so as not to get attached to them.
The life of some of my initial Blakes was not good. Some died to skeletons. A lot of them died to the very first boss of the dungeon. Some were poisoned as well. However, the death of these initial Blakes led to many victories for the future Blakes who ventured far below the first floor of the dungeon. Every run is unique, as the game generates a random dungeon for your character. Each floor has a multitude of rooms, and before you enter them, you can actually see what type of enemies, treasures, or structures are present in that room.
Depending on your current skill level, you can make the decision to move forward. I always worked my way up the number of enemies because this way, my character leveled up to handle the increased number of enemies, and some of the bigger enemies also hit pretty hard. When you enter a room with enemies, the doors are locked, and you have to defeat all enemies to move to another room. However, if you have a key, you can just spend it opening the doors and running away from the battle, and trust me, running away from a fight in Bad House is not a thing to be ashamed of because it means that you get to live another day with your current character.
Exploring rooms and killing enemies will get you a lot of items. These include health potions, weapons, and gear that you can equip to make your character powerful. Since the fights are automated, your only task is to make sure that the right items are used at the right time. This means that you need to make sure that you keep your health filled to the top, the correct character-level items are equipped, and the best weapons are in your character’s hands. There is no separate slot for weapons or armor, so you only have three slots for both weapons and armor, so it’s a bargain between whether you want to increase your offense or your defense. Both play an important role, so your build will need a good balance between the two. Along with this, you have four slots for smaller items like amulets, which provide different buffs for your character.
Apart from boxes and chests with items, you will often find other things of interest in different rooms, like a Monolith or an Altar of Change. These places provide a one-time use for some upgrades. The Monolith allows you to enchant items to add buffs, while the Altar of Change allows you to change your equipped skills. Every time you level up, you can add a new skill to your list of equipped moves, and if you do not like one, you can change it at the altar. When you begin the game, you can only choose one skill. Additionally, more powerful skills are unlocked once your character hits certain milestone levels. If you happen to find a bonfire, you can also rest and restore your health back to full.
Out of everything that you can use in Bad House, my favourite skills were summoning skills. Certain skills in Bad House allow you to summon different creatures to aid in combat. They not only deal damage but also act as damage sponges, as most of the enemies would focus on them first. In one run, I had three skeletons, two bats, and an imp with me, and I was undefeatable until the second boss popped up. It was a fun run. Since the unlocked character was melee, the game’s official Steam page does mention that there are some magic characters as well, so they will offer ranged combat. That is one thing I am looking forward to trying.
Progression in the game takes place through stairs. As you explore a floor, you will eventually end up in a room that has a stair going down. This takes you to another floor below your current one with more advanced enemies and tougher challenges. I mostly tried to complete a floor fully before moving down, because in a few runs where I rushed down, I ended up dying quickly after clearing 1 or 2 rooms. After every few floors, the way up was removed, forcing me to stay on the current floor. Often I found an upward stair as well, which allowed me to visit my personal room back at the top of the floor and get to the merchant at the start of the dungeon. I was allowed to use these stairs only once as well, before they were destroyed once I came back down.
While death is permanent in the game, the game does allow you to buy back some items from your previous run if you have sufficient blood. Once your current run ends in death, you are rewarded with blood. This can be used to purchase your lost items at the start of your new run. This merchant is found right at the start of the game. Alongside merchants, I also met some interesting NPCs in the game, including a bird monster that avoided fighting me and wanted to craft helpful items for me, provided that I supplied the right tools for it. I also met a Knight near one of the bonfires who had some dialogue but did not do much else.
Bad House is not a very demanding game when it comes to visuals or technical advancements. It has a simple visual style that works for it. The top-down visuals are decent, and the enemy variety is surprisingly varied. There are plenty of different enemies that you will find throughout the multiple floors of the basement. The same goes for rooms as well. Since everything is randomly generated, no run is similar. While the enemy type remains the same for floors, each room will always have a different number and variety of enemies. Each floor’s boss is rotated as well, which keeps things fresh. Depending on your current build, you will either have a tough time with the boss, or just breeze through it.
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Bad House is a decent title for auto-battler fans. I, myself, am not such a huge fan of this genre, but after playing Bad House, I can see how important item management and preparing your character in these titles can be. Surprisingly, I enjoyed my time in Bad House more than I thought I would. The UI is simple; the mechanics are not overly complicated, and the dungeons follow a simple design. Surviving boss battles in another story. After killing a few of my early characters, I got a solid grip on the mechanics and made good progress through the levels. Only when you clear the initial few levels do you start to understand the depth of the game. If you like dungeon-crawling auto-battlers, you should definitely check out Bad House. Bad House is slated for a PC Steam release in 2027, and this is one auto-battler that I will be checking out again when it comes out.
Disclaimer: A PC Steam demo code for Bad House was provided by Tinsley PR on behalf of The Arcade Crew and Dotemu for this preview. For a detailed breakdown of our scoring and review process, please refer to our Review Policy.
