House Call

HOUSE CALL

A transdimensional defense contractor. Your clients have a pest problem.

You’re a contractor. Not that kind. The kind who shows up in a suit made of starfield, listens to a man with a shotgun explain what’s been coming out of his woods at night, quotes him a price, and then calls every last one of those things out of the trees at once so his towers can deal with them. He’s done this before. Most of his clients even lived.

House Call is a short, funny, first-person tower defence game that runs in your browser. You walk the job site on foot, plan your defence from a tablet, watch the wave hit, and bill the client.

How a job works

• Pick a contract on the ship. Your vessel is home between jobs: a job board, a wardrobe, a practice floor, and Mavis, the ship, who has opinions about all of it.
• Meet the client. Each contract opens with a short cutscene. The old man at the homestead points Bessie at you. The frontier town points about nine guns at you, and then the mayor’s wife does the talking.
• Plan from your tablet. Open Drone View for a top-down feed of the site. A red band shows what share of the wave is coming from each side. Place towers anywhere inside the build zone, or on rooftops in town. Planned towers are holograms until you confirm, then they pixelate themselves into existence.
• Start the wave, and hold. The towers aim and fire on their own. You’re free to run around the site, climb on things, go for a drink in the saloon, or open the tablet again and add towers mid-wave. Run it at 2x when you’re confident.
• Get paid. Whatever budget you don’t spend is yours. Go over and it comes out of your payout. The bill at the end shows your profit, your kills by tower, and your best tower.

Five towers

• Ballistic turret. Cheap and fast. Weak against armour.
• Railgun. One enormous shot that goes straight through anything.
• EMP emitter. Does no damage. Slows everything in its ring so your guns get more shots.
• Mortar. Lobs a shell that blasts the crowd.
• Tesla coil. Lightning that jumps from enemy to enemy. Packs of fast things hate it.

Each tower has three upgrade marks, bought with your account money and kept between jobs. The ship’s practice floor is a free simulator: place towers, send practice targets at a stand-in house, and watch how far each upgrade reaches.

Two contracts, two more coming

• The homestead. A house at the edge of the woods at dusk, one wave, a client with a shotgun named Bessie, and a mailbox you will probably not save.
• The frontier town. A desert town under a red sun, a well that things climb out of, townsfolk on the balconies with rifles who actually shoot, a saloon you can sit down in, and a mayor who never finishes a sentence.
• The Deep (a settlement on the sea floor) and The Moon Base are on the job board as coming soon. You can see both worlds from the observation deck.

Three difficulties, per contract

Standard is the game as built. Hard makes them faster, straighter and harder-hitting, and pays 25% more. Brutal is relentless and pays 50% more. Each contract remembers its own setting, and the job board stamps what you’ve earned: No damage, Under budget, Brutal clear.

Also in the box

• A ship with a job board, a wardrobe (suit glow, tie, cloth, hats, eyewear) and an observation deck.
• Mavis. She comments on your flights, your hats, your spending, and how the last job went.
• Win scenes for each contract, and a Replay option for the intros and endings.
• Lofi music that changes when the swarm starts.
• A guide for your first visit that teaches the controls and the tablet on the ship’s practice floor, before anything real is at stake.
• Keyboard and mouse, controller (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch button names), and touch controls on phones and tablets.
• Settings: field of view, sensitivity, invert look, volume sliders, graphics quality, colour-blind range rings (distinct colours and line patterns per tower), and key remapping.

Controls

Keyboard: WASD to move, mouse to look (click the view to lock it), Space to jump, Shift to run, V for the tablet, F to use, Enter to start the wave / confirm / 2x speed, P to pause, 1–5 to pick a tower in Drone View. All of these can be remapped in the pause menu.

Good to know

• Runs in the browser, no install. Needs WebGL. A desktop browser is best; it also works on phones with touch controls.
• Your account, upgrades, difficulty choices and look are saved in your browser.
• Contains adult language. The contractor swears a little. The old man swears more.
• Music and sound effects are licensed from Pixabay (credits are in the game file).