House of Necrosis Review

Shiren the Wanderer checks into the Spencer Mansion

House of Necrosis pitches itself with unusual precision: take the permadeath, dungeon-diving structure of a classic Mystery Dungeon roguelike, and dress it in the crumbling mansion, tank controls, and PS1-era grain of Resident Evil 1. Developed and published solo by Warkus, it released on Steam on 6 October 2025 at NZ$17.49, following a clean, fully public development arc -- a demo running from February through April 2025, a formal release-date announcement that September, and launch just under three weeks later -- that leaves the date in no real doubt as a genuine original release rather than a relabelled one.

The pitch lands, according to an unusually large and enthusiastic review sample for a solo-developed indie: 605 reviews at the time of writing, 572 of them positive, a Very Positive rating reviewers arrived at from strikingly consistent angles. One writes simply, "Resident Evil Mystery Dungeon. This game is awesome. Nails the aesthetic and the gameplay loop is SUPER fun," while a more detailed review calls it "a very apparent love letter to not only an entire genre of games... but also to a wide array of gaming legends," specifically citing Parasite Eve's item-stat display and Final Fantasy's spell-casting sound design as clear influences beyond the obvious Resident Evil skin. The PS1-styled pixel art draws particularly consistent praise -- one reviewer calls it "the best example I have ever seen of PSX aesthetic/visuals" -- and more than one review notes the developer, credited in-game and on Steam simply as Warkus, has described the project as a four-year solo passion project, a detail at least one reviewer confirmed directly after the developer visited their livestream.

Mechanically, runs begin at the mansion's entrance and unfold turn-by-turn through procedurally structured floors, with permadeath resetting character level on death while permanently retaining learned spells, expanded inventory capacity, and levelled gear carried out of the dungeon in an item box. Reviewers describe genuine tactical depth in the moment-to-moment decisions this creates -- one writes that "doing well at this game entails identifying enemy behavior patterns and knowing exactly when and how to move," weighing an emergency retreat against pushing for more loot with dwindling resources -- a framing echoed by several others who single out the resource-management tension as more thoughtful than the genre's reputation for randomness might suggest.

Set against that praise, the review sample converges on a specific, credible, and repeatedly corroborated concern: House of Necrosis is punishingly, and by several accounts increasingly, difficult. Multiple reviewers who played the pre-launch demo report their preferred builds were quietly nerfed for release -- one describes a "Refund Ammo on Kill" mechanic changed to a much rarer "chance" to refund ammo, undercutting an entire build archetype -- and several later reviewers, writing months after launch, separately describe balance patches making the game noticeably harder still, with one writing plainly that "it feels like it was patched to be impossible" and another reporting the game had gone from a run they could "consistently make it to the second area" to one where "the first area boss push[es them] into a hallway... one-shotting me." That's an unusually specific and repeated pattern -- reviewers independently describing the same post-launch trend of escalating rather than easing difficulty -- and it lines up precisely with what Steam's own achievement data shows: only 42.3% of players ever obtain the game's first-area key, that funnel narrows to 13.8% for the first major boss kill, and just 7.0% of all players have reached the game's true ending, corroborating more than one reviewer's specific claim that "most players don't even get past the first chapter."

A handful of more targeted complaints round out the sample's criticism. One widely echoed complaint singles out a specific late-game mechanic by name: a "1HP curse floor" where monsters can camp the exit, turning what should be an escape tool into what one reviewer calls a trap that "erases hours of your progress" -- language several other reviewers use in substance if not in exact wording when describing end-game unfairness. A separate, specific economic complaint concerns a late-game permanent-progression item gated behind 300,000 in-game gold, with one reviewer explicitly requesting the developer lower that cost given how much grinding a single death demands to re-earn it. And a recurring structural complaint, distinct from raw difficulty, is that losing character level on every death makes revisiting earlier, already-cleared floors during a fresh run feel like unrewarding busywork rather than genuine roguelike variety, with several reviewers wishing for some form of partial, permanent level retention.

One more detailed critical review is worth reporting on its own terms: rather than difficulty, it argues the game's borrowed Mystery Dungeon mechanics -- identify-by-menu items, "hexes" and "spells" -- sit uneasily against its Resident Evil aesthetic, arguing the game "would have given it a more original identity" by leaning further into survival-horror-specific item mechanics like herb combining rather than directly reusing roguelike genre conventions. That's a meaningfully different critique from the difficulty-balance complaints above, and this review treats it as a genuine, if minority, perspective within an otherwise strongly positive sample.

Verdict

House of Necrosis earns its Very Positive reception honestly: a genuinely distinctive, lovingly executed Mystery Dungeon-meets-Resident-Evil mashup with real tactical depth and a widely praised PS1-era presentation, built by one developer over four years. Its clearest weakness, backed by both a consistent chorus of specific reviewer complaints and Steam's own steep achievement funnel, is a difficulty curve that seems to have grown harsher rather than gentler since launch -- worth knowing going in for anyone who isn't already a fan of genuinely brutal, permadeath-driven roguelikes.