A direct descendent of parser-driven text adventures, House Party reminds me of the adult interactive fiction of the 90s, and I certainly mean that as praise. This is Interactive Fiction in the old-school sense, with a compact environment, lots of verbs to use, and enough objects to fill multiple pages of your inventory. Progress is satisfying, getting stuck is frustrating, and sometimes you want to use a walkthrough, but you don't and have more fun for it.
The game is well-written, looks great, has real laugh-out-loud moments and interesting stories for most of the characters to follow. The main story, when it really gets moving, does manage to feel like an increasingly chaotic house party.
However, it lacks some of the openness of the old-school games. Rarely can you combine items in unexpected ways, rarely is there that moment when you think, "no way is this going to do anythin--damn, the dev even thought of that." Part of this probably comes down to the dialogue menu being the main tool for both advancing and telling the story, as it would in a modern visual novel. This half of the game's identity often butts heads with the pick-up-and-try-everything approach of its adventure game half, and sometimes I found myself quitting the game to play proper visual novels where more limited interactions managed to feel more immersive.
I think this minor identity crisis is evident in other parts of House Party as well. The game is full of incidental dialogue that is funny and revealing, but it's played at an extremely low volume and has no effect in the play-space. There is dialogue that characters can overhear and react to, but it is, again, limited to the dialogue trees. NPCs are scheduled to move around the house, but have little to interact with, and are sometimes literally standing alone in a corner. The game gives you the ability to remove articles of clothing individually, has a urine and an orgasm meter, but exposing yourself seems to have limited and context-specific uses and consequences. In other words, the game systems are there, but they don't feel fully fleshed out.
And of course, systems are the hardest part of game design. Developers spend their whole careers theorizing about how to tell a story through interaction. The creators of House Party deserve a lot of praise (and sales) for their synthesis of a lot of design ideas, as well as their creation of a really great storytelling tool. House party is extremely fun interactive fiction that has a ton of satisfying elements in its toolset but doesn't quite manage to use them all in harmony.
Not this time, anyway. I have high hopes that future stories will do amazing things with these tools.