Home is a side scrolling horror story where the narrative is dictated by player choice. In a beautifully pixelated world your hero wakes in an unfamiliar house and from then on, the story is relative to your actions. There’s no way I can go on to tell you the storyline as my experience with the game will have yielded varying results to what you might experience when playing.
After waking up you roam the world, interacting with objects and piecing things together based on the information you have been given. It’s a text heavy game with little gameplay but this is used to its advantage. A single play through won’t take longer than two hours to finish and on multiple journeys into the world of Home you can create some drastically varying narratives.
As you interact with objects the character tells you what they mean to him, sometimes prompting you to decide the importance of the item too, a simple choice will turn a gun into an important plot device that hangs over your character every step of the way. Every choice and action subtly changes the narrative.
While Home calls itself a horror game, I personally think it leans towards a Thriller than anything. There are never any big moments you would relate to a horror, but there is the constant feeling of dread as the sound design pulls you into the world. I’ve not experienced many games that can have me paranoid yet gripped the whole way through, as a gamer that gives up on a lot of horror games out of fear, this is just one I couldn’t put down and once I was done, I jumped right back in to experience it all again from another perspective.
From a game perspective, this lacks in actual gameplay. You walk from left to right shining your torch at objects and interacting with them for a short description, sometimes hitting Y or N to represent a Yes or No choice. While this is used to the maximum potential in the game, some may be turned off by the lack of variety in what you can do. From a storytelling perspective, it pulls things off perfectly, no matter what conclusion you come to, it will seem like the right chain of events. After playing through the game it prompts you to go to the website and share your story with other player, a lovely way of seeing the varying views and stories that other players got from it.
Home is a brilliant little narrative that wont last you longer than a couple hours on your first play through. It’s packed with replay value, a great ambiance and a minimalistic yet well executed gameplay choice. Some people may be turned off by the gameplay but for everyone else, it’s a worthy pick. Home is available on Steam for £1.99, or you can purchase it through the website Here