Technical Information

Developer: Maldo19
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Release Date: October 15, 2020

Play as journalist Elisa and investigate the disappearance of a family that occurred in 1986.
The Horror of Salazar House is a game with point and click elements and visuals inspired by the Virtual Boy aesthetic.

Final Thoughts – Analyzing the Game as a Whole

Graphics and UI

I really liked the art. Despite being pixel art, it gives the game a very sinister atmosphere.
The animations are beautiful.

I played the game entirely in Portuguese and often noticed that text overlapped the text boxes or that words were cut off. There were also some sections displaying “localization not found.”
This didn’t completely ruin the experience for me, but there were specific moments when it made understanding the story difficult.

When reading the black book, the combination of red tones and the pixel font made visibility quite poor.

Soundtrack and Sound Effects

The soundtrack reinforces the creepy atmosphere and has a strong retro feel.
There’s no doubt you’ll get scared at some point by a jump scare, but they eventually become predictable.

Gameplay

If you enjoy horror games (especially those with a Clock Tower vibe, where you explore, solve puzzles, and run away while hiding), you’ll definitely enjoy this game. But hold on… unfortunately, I do have some reservations.
The gameplay is quite simple and features an interesting story (although it feels somewhat generic).

You can move using the WASD keys or by clicking the directional arrows on the interface.
There’s no clear pattern during pursuit sequences. Even if you hide, sometimes the enemy won’t leave and will kill you. Other times, you can’t escape because the enemy suddenly increases speed and appears right in front of you.
From a distance, this seems like a deliberate mechanic rather than poor programming disguised as randomness.

When you’re close to being chased, the screen turns dark red — which is a great and intuitive alert. However, each room in the game also changes color. Some rooms have fixed tones, and I couldn’t identify any consistent pattern that justified this design choice.

The bugs present in the game bothered me a lot (and trust me, I’m used to dealing with plenty of bugs in indie games haha).
The save system doesn’t work properly. If you save your progress and later return to finish something — even if you didn’t overwrite the file — your save may simply disappear, as if it had been overwritten.
This really frustrated me because I had to restart the game to unlock an ending and lost my previous progress.

There is only one save slot, so you need to make careful decisions.

I played through the game, but it could have been much better if it weren’t for the number of bugs.

Replayability and Game Retention

My curiosity about seeing all the endings is what kept me playing.
I used a guide to unlock three endings that I genuinely didn’t know how to achieve. Unfortunately, due to the save bug, one ending (“Family”) remains locked, and I didn’t have the energy to start everything over again just to unlock it.