Review: Home
About
Home is a unique game in most every way. Its a thought-provoking, story driven horror/adventure game with no shortage of style. The game has many endings and forces the player to form their own conclusions based on the evidence they find throughout the game. Though the game has plenty of shortcomings, its guaranteed to leave a lasting impression on anyone who plays it.
Gameplay
Home has some of the simplest controls I’ve seen in a PC game, you can walk left or right, look up and interact with objects, and exit the game. Given you can only move and interact, the game plays like many other adventure games, except as a 2D side-scroller. No frilly combat systems or cluttered inventories to manage, the game adopts the minimum number of controls to convey it’s story. As you wander through the game you may jump if easily startled, but the bulk of the experience is simply reading and interacting with the environment, weather its flipping a switch or picking up a knife. The pacing is rather slow, and the adventure style means there’ll be no action, but if you can enjoy a game who’s only real asset is story and art, your unlikely to find the gameplay lacking.
Style
As is the case with any adventure game, story and environment are everything and in the case of Home both are fairly solid. The games story will likely stick with you for a long time and may even prompt you to replay the game, but the stories strongest asset, its open-endedness, is also it’s greatest flaw. The story has a grand twist or two and really comes together at the end. Also, the stories multiple endings help a lot but left me feeling unfulfilled in the way they came togather, much like the movie “The Village” did when I learned that (spoiler alert) there never was a monster. Also, some may love the way the storise thought provoking ending, my distaste may be no more then my own preference. While the story left me wanting, the art didn’t. Home combines great music and low res but beautiful environments to immerse the player in a beautiful, creepy mystery though the low resolution may be a turnoff too some.
Overall
Home’s a interesting case, It’s dripping with style and full of interesting artistic choices which will turn off some but excite others. Thanks to the excellent since of mystery, you probably won’t want to stop playing until it’s done, so I’d suggest you set aside a couple hours to finish it in one setting. Overall, the game is memoriable, unique, and very reasonably priced ($2.99 on steam at the time of writing), and at that price point, I’d call this game a wonderful value!
Jestern Games 