Welcome back to our second and final post on the trivia behind Your House — a look at the little things: the names we dropped, the music we grew up with, the posters we always dreamed of hanging on our walls (and the safes we hid behind them).
In this post, we go deeper into the rooms, the references, and the characters — from 2 Tone records and gentleman thieves to cat names, Montreux Jazz Festival posters, and a secret tribute to Roberto Bolaño.
If you missed Part 1, we recommend starting here. Otherwise, let’s keep digging.
Serena Pulin
Yes, It’s an anagram. You might’ve caught it — or maybe not. Serena Pulin is just Arsène Lupin, rearranged. It’s a small clue, hidden in plain sight, and we loved the idea of rewarding players who like to play with names. Just like Lupin did.
Arsène Lupin, the legendary gentleman thief created by Maurice Leblanc in 1905, wasn’t just a master of disguise — he was a master of narrative. He rewrote his identity constantly, not just with wigs and forged documents, but with language. In The Hollow Needle, Lupin even uses an anagram of his own name — “Louis Valméras” — to throw detectives off his trail. It’s not just a trick. It’s a philosophy: if people only see what they expect, give them something else entirely.
That idea — the fluid self, the theatrical transformation — sits at the heart of Your House. Serena Pulin isn’t just an architect. She’s also Leon, the elusive thief. She’s also someone who had to reinvent herself to survive in a world built to contain her. The name is the first mask she puts on. But it won’t be the last.
Secret Room Bookshelf
Tucked away in Serena’s secret study is a curated collection of books about architecture and heists. Chief among them? A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh. This brilliant book explores how burglars — real and fictional — use spatial thinking and architectural insight to infiltrate buildings and escape unnoticed.
It was this book that introduced us to George Leonidas Leslie, an architect-turned-bank-robber responsible for planning an astonishing number of 19th-century heists. It also reminded us of Moriarty’s architectural master plan in the Sherlock Holmes universe: an underground labyrinth of tunnels beneath London for crime and escape. These influences helped shape the entire structure of Chapter 3 — a narrative of blueprints, shadows, and secret passageways.
👉 A Burglar’s Guide to the City – Goodreads
Cabinet of Curiosities
There’s a moment in Your House when Debbie finds a room no one was supposed to find. It’s not Serena’s secret study. It’s something stranger. Deeper. Buried further beneath the house. A room that feels… outside of time.
We always imagined it as our version of a cabinet of curiosities — those eclectic, eerie collections from the 16th and 17th centuries, back before we had museums. Wealthy travelers, scientists, and eccentrics would gather oddities from their journeys — a narwhal tusk here, a miniature mummy there, a sketch of a lizard no one had named yet. They didn’t try to explain them. That wasn’t the point. These were wonder rooms — places to marvel, to guess, to feel small in the face of the unknown.
That’s the energy we wanted for this hidden space.
When Debbie enters, the light is dim. The air is heavier. And the objects — well, let’s just say they weren’t left there by accident. They’re tokens from another life. A fossil, a broken toy, a newspaper clipping, a necklace that shouldn’t exist. They don’t come with labels. They come with questions.
This room doesn’t explain the story. It deepens it.
If we could, we’d open a real-world version — something like 826 Valencia or Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, places that look like whimsical curiosity shops but secretly help kids write stories. Until then, this is ours. You’ll have to dig for it. But it’s there, waiting — a quiet museum of the unlived, the left behind, and the almost remembered.
Garden Gnomes
Yes, there are gnomes in the garden. But they’re not holding fishing rods or pushing wheelbarrows. These ones are different. If you look closely — really look — you’ll see the names carved into their bases: Simon Templar (a.k.a. The Saint), Arsène Lupin, Thomas Crown and Filibus, the sky pirate in heels
All of them legendary thieves. All of them masters of charm, disguise, and vanishing acts. And now? All of them stone.
It’s our little joke. The most elusive characters in fiction — turned into lawn ornaments. Frozen mid-heist. Their capes ruffled. Their secrets sealed. We like to think of them not as decorations, but as guardians. Or conspirators. If you played unmemory, you’ve already bumped into a few of them. Filibus, in particular, used to be Jamie’s teddy bear. She’s been with us for a while.
There’s something irresistible about the gentleman (or gentlewoman) thief archetype — the ones who steal not out of greed, but for the thrill, the artistry, the sense of poetic justice. They’re not robbers. They’re performance artists. Simon Templar. Lupin. Crown. Even Filibus — a silent film heroine from 1915 who pulled off airship heists in full costume change, decades before anyone heard of Catwoman.
Turning them into garden gnomes felt like a tribute and a prank at once. A wink to anyone who knows their names. And maybe a warning to anyone who thinks the house is sleeping.
RST Video
We named it RST Video as a quiet homage to Clerks — Kevin Smith’s no-budget masterpiece where philosophy, customer service, and Star Wars debates collide behind a convenience store counter. In that film, RST is a dim little video store next to Quick Stop Groceries. Nothing glamorous. No neon signs. But somehow, it felt like the most important building in New Jersey. It was ours.
So when it came time to build Debbie’s world, we gave her an RST too. A place that smells like carpet and popcorn dust. A place where movies aren’t just entertainment — they’re instruction manuals for how to be a person. And of course, we stacked the shelves with some of our all-time favorites.
- The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick) A heist movie disguised as a time bomb. Brutal, clinical, and heartbreaking. We always loved how everything in this film is tightly planned — and then falls apart, beautifully.
- Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978, Blake Edwards / Peter Sellers) Pure chaos in a trench coat. Inspector Clouseau is the anti-Lupin — a bumbling force of entropy who somehow always wins. We watched these films as kids, and they’re still funny in that delirious, out-of-control way only Sellers could do.
- Irma Vep Not the Olivier Assayas remake. We’re going way back — to Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires. Irma Vep is a thief, a spy, maybe a ghost — always in black, always slipping through keyholes. She’s part danger, part style. And if Leon, the thief in Your House, feels a little operatic, a little haunted... well, you can thank Irma for that.
These aren’t just nods. They’re threads. The kind you pull on when you want to understand how stories are built — or unraveled. We like our burglars precise and flawed. We like them to wear masks but feel real. And we like our video stores filled with ghosts.
📍 Bonus: if you ever find a tape labeled "For Debbie", don’t press play just yet.
The Mexicans
When I was a kid, my dad had this joke. He’d draw a circle, add a simple line through it, and ask, “What’s this?” I’d squint. “No idea.” He’d smile: “A Mexican peeing.” And I’d laugh — every single time. He’d keep going: a Mexican dancing. A Mexican eating. A whole world of stick-figure Mexicans doing absolutely everything, all made with a few lazy pen strokes. It was absurd. And strangely vivid.
For years, that was just our thing — a little private mythology drawn on napkins and paper scraps.
And then, much later, I opened The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Somewhere near the back, I found them again. The Mexicans. Little round men, rendered in the same minimal way. Almost like ghosts from a joke I thought only we had told.
Bolaño doesn’t explain them much. He just leaves them there, drawn into the margins of his epic about poets, wanderers, exiles. But I knew exactly what they were — they were my dad’s Mexicans. Or maybe his were Bolaño’s. Maybe they belonged to no one and everyone. Just circles. Just lines. But somehow, stories.
Ever since, I’ve wanted to bring them into something. A puzzle, maybe. A page full of dumb, brilliant figures with secret meaning. A tribute to the kind of joke you only understand when you're seven — and still laugh at when you're forty.
Somewhere in Your House, they found a way in. That little world came back. A circle, a line. And everything you don’t expect from them.
👉 The Savage Detectives – Wikipedia
Count Chocula
You’ll find a box of Count Chocula cereal somewhere in Your House — and yes, it’s Debbie’s favorite. It’s not just a breakfast. It’s a statement. For those unfamiliar: Count Chocula is one of General Mills’ legendary monster-themed cereals (alongside Franken Berry, Boo Berry, etc.). Chocolatey puffs, marshmallows, and the grinning cartoon vampire — the kind of sugary rebellion every kid dreams of when told to eat something “with fiber.”
We loved these cereals growing up, especially because they always felt slightly forbidden — too sweet, too weird, too cool. That’s Debbie, too. A little defiant, a little playful, clinging to strange comforts in the middle of her chaos.
The Cats
In Chapter 4, Debbie opens a mysterious compartment — a kind of feline shrine. Inside: photos, notes, and the names of cats past and present. But these aren’t just random names. Each one carries a reference, a nod to a cat we once knew, loved, or laughed at on the internet:
- Sylvester – The iconic black-and-white cartoon cat who never quite catches Tweety.
- Grumpy – The internet’s most unwilling celebrity, Grumpy Cat, queen of the meme age.
- Maru – YouTube royalty from Japan, best known for fitting into absurdly small boxes.
- Cat – A wink to the nameless stray from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and maybe to Cat from Red Dwarf, too.
- Felix – One of the first ever animated cats, dating back to the silent film era.
- Tommy the Cat – A deep cut: a surreal character in a song by Primus, half-spoken, half-snarled, all weird.
- Krazy Kat – From George Herriman’s early 20th-century comic strip — abstract, poetic, and way ahead of its time.
- Azrael – Originally the name of the evil wizard’s cat in The Smurfs, though in the game we ended up renaming this one Mochi — to make room for something more personal and less expected.
These cats are a constellation — pop culture, childhood memories, YouTube marathons, indie comics, and deep musical cuts. A secret history of affection and obsession, told in meows.
👉 Tommy the Cat – Primus (Live)
Two Tone
Chapter 5 of Your House is... well, a bit of a mixtape. It’s filled with records, posters, and musical ghosts from the past — not just because Debbie loves music, but because we do too.
You’ll spot vinyl singles from The Zombies, The Doors, and Dave Brubeck. A poster from the Montreux Jazz Festival, complete with secret safe hidden behind it. (Yes, we’ve always dreamed of going. One day we will.)
But the heartbeat of the chapter — the one that really made us smile — is the quiet tribute to 2 Tone.
2 Tone was a British ska label from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Its sound was raw and joyful, political and playful. Think Madness, The Specials, The Beat, The Selecter. These bands were the soundtrack of our teenage years. The kind of music you discover when you need something to shout and dance to at the same time. Ska with a sharp edge. Suits and Doc Martens. Melancholy and rebellion you could move to.
