Britain’s Love of Lying Has Got So Bad a Family Turned Their Own House Into a Mind Game
Britain has a problem. We’re hooked on lying to each other, or at least watching other people do it extremely well on television.
Trust issues are having a moment. Betrayal is back. And paranoia, it seems, is the nation’s favourite spectator sport.
So much so that one Whitstable family has decided to stop letting us watch from the sofa and instead invited us into their own home to do it properly.
Welcome to House of Deceit, a two-night, fully hosted immersive game where suspicion is the main course, alliances are optional, and your mates suddenly become the least trustworthy people you know.
This isn’t a theme park attraction or a soulless warehouse dressed up as “immersive”. It’s a real coastal house. A family lives there. People sleep in the beds. Which somehow makes the whole thing far more unsettling.
The mastermind behind it is James Gordon, a live events and reality TV producer who looked at years of manufacturing tension on screen and realised the best set he’d ever had was already his living room.
“We didn’t need to build anything,” Gordon says. “A real house does the work for you. Real rooms, real corners, real atmosphere. You can’t fake that.”
He’s not wrong. There’s something about playing mind games in a place that feels too normal that really gets under the skin. By the time night falls, you start questioning whether that creak on the stairs is part of the game… or someone doing something they definitely shouldn’t be.
Guests arrive as a private group, friends, colleagues, birthday crews, work teams and over two nights the house slowly tightens its grip. Bedrooms matter. The garden matters. Casual chats turn into intelligence gathering. Jokes suddenly feel loaded.
And there are no cameras.
“That’s the point,” Gordon explains. “On TV you manufacture pressure with edits and music. Here, the people are the show. If someone lies, everyone feels it.”
The timing couldn’t be better. Britain has fallen hard for games built on trust, deception and watching people unravel politely. But House of Deceit doesn’t copy any one format. It borrows the tension, not the rulebook.
“People don’t want to just watch anymore,” Gordon says. “They want to know what it feels like to second-guess their friends, form alliances, then realise halfway through the weekend they’ve backed the wrong horse.”
Also: it’s funny. Darkly so. The kind of laughter that comes from watching your best mate confidently accuse the wrong person while someone else quietly wins.
By day, you’re in Whitstable; oysters, sea air, smug seaside calm. By night, the house changes. Conversations drop in volume. Someone knows something. Someone else is bluffing badly. You start wondering how well you actually know the people you came with.
And crucially, it all feels refreshingly real.
In an age of AI-generated experiences, hyper-produced nonsense and dopamine-fried weekends, House of Deceit strips it back to something simple: a house, a group of people, and the slow realisation that trust is optional.
Preview dates are now available at a reduced rate ahead of the full launch later this spring. Groups are capped at 15, bookings are private, and costs can be split, because nothing says friendship like financially committing to psychological warfare together.
“It’s intimate, it’s unsettling, and it’s much funnier than people expect,” Gordon says. “You spend the day in a beautiful coastal town, then at night the house has… other plans.”
Just don’t expect everyone to leave on speaking terms.
Bookings and details: www.RebelBingo.com/House