Home Reviews

[i]Home[/i] was on a list of games I had already played (in this case about a decade ago) that added achievements some time after I had already beaten them. Not wanting to disappoint the completionist in me by letting a game I'd already technically 100%'d sit there taunting me with by adding a 0% to my completion average, I finally decided to earn them. And it did not take long for me to remember why I had put that task off. This game does one thing extremely well: waste your time. The protagonist has a limp, so he walks slowly, and I'm pretty sure certain actions can make him even slower. When you enter a different room via stairs, a ladder or a door, not only is there an unskippable three-second cutscene, but your flashlight takes an additional two seconds to light up properly for whatever reason, meaning you have to wait five seconds unless you know which direction you're going next. On top of [i]that[/i] if you enter a door that has stairs, it does the animation for both, making that a total of eight seconds waiting to really be able to do anything in the next room. Any time a text box opens up, a slow unskippable narration that you can't speed up plays. These appear when you are about to leave an area and can't return (good), whenever you are going to pick up an item (fine), or whenever you are going to interact with something (understandable), which includes if you need to interact with an item multiple times (bad). On top of all that, true to the Adventure genre, you will do a lot of walking back and forth trying to find what you need to do when and where, sometimes in a maze. To get every achievement, you have to go through the game three times to get the three endings that don't really make any difference other than what the protagonist does after learning the plot... for lack of a better term. You see, what you do through the game determines a few things the protagonist reflects on at the end, but you get to say yes or no to a vague conclusion he reaches, so nothing happens for sure. He goes over every detail he learns in each area as well as every conclusion you help him reach after you decide which ending to do in the same slow unskippable text format, thus punishing you for exploring. Vague plots are fine, and I don't need my hand held for them when they're like that, but it just doesn't work in this case. Since I mentioned achievements, there's one that straight-up lies in the description by claiming you have to go through the game without picking up any items, but there are some that you absolutely need to pick up to continue, so if you don't already know that... see where I'm going with this? Look, I hate downvoting cheap indie games, but as someone who ended up dragging himself through this thing six flippin' times, I just have to hit that big thumb down.

I did not realize the main hook of this game until I had already beaten it. Very smart game design. Really need to play it through two or three more times.

Terrible writing, just terrible, the horror comes from cheap jumpscares, the gameplay mechanics are somehow overused or bad implemented. The only way of fixing this game is rewriting all the dialog, and that just would make it an acceptable game.