Review: Home

Posted by Curtis H on November 7th, 2014 | 2 Comments | Tags: Home

Home begins with your character waking up in a strange house without any sort of memory. Armed only with a flashlight you’ll spend the next ~90 minutes searching through the house among a few other locations hoping to piece together what exactly is going on. More importantly Home’s narrative is directly influenced by your own actions. Picking up a gun that you find might, at some point, have an impact in the story — or maybe it won’t. Much of what makes Home’s vague story great is the fact that everything is left for you to decide.

When you start up Home you’ll be greeted with a message that encourages you to play with lights off, headphones on, and to finish the game in one sitting. Home isn’t scary so much as it is very atmospheric. Home gets a lot of mileage out of very simplistic graphics and a handful of sound effects. The slow drips of water from a sink, the squeaks of a mouse running across the floor, and the static from a television left turned on. It all goes a long way in creating an unsettling atmosphere. It’s clear from the start that something truly terrible has happened.

You’re probably not going to figure out everything on your first playthrough of Home. It’s very much something that is meant to be played multiple times with different choices. After two thorough playthroughs there are still a few things I’m not sure about. Many of the key story points are things that Home will never flat out tell you. It’s all up for you to decide on your own using the clues given to you. With the exception of a few weird lines of text (mentioning the gun I found in a playthrough that I didn’t find the gun) everything works pretty well.

Home is a pretty easy recommendation helped by the fact that it’ll only run you a few dollars. It’s an interesting way to tell a story that doesn’t necessarily have one true conclusion.

A copy of this game was purchased for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.