Tempo de Jogo:
12 minutos
In Home Sweet Home you play as a man named Tim, who hasn't quite been himself since his wife Jane went missing. Seemingly stricken with grief, Jane ended up having a total mental breakdown before finally disappearing; having seen and heard entities that were otherwise invisible to Tim, right in their own home. Tim wakes up one day in a completely unfamiliar location, but he knows he has to buckle down and find his wife. Although there is a little bit of voice acted dialogue, much of the story is told through various notes; newspapers, Jane's diary, and several lore documents detailing the monsters that you end up encountering along the way.
Home Sweet Home takes a lot of stock survival horror ideas, rearranges them in a complicated manner, and shoves some distinctly Thai lore into the middle of it all to make the experience more unique. There is your standard note and key finding, psychological mind games like changing rooms and hallways, one hit kill enemies, and easy puzzles. The largest portion of the game is made up of playing hide and seek with a forlorn dead girl who cries incessantly for her lost lover; if she sees you, she goes into a violent fit of rage, and since she's wielding a snap-blade knife, she'll stab you to death with it if you don't climb into the nearest locker fast enough. There's obviously a lot of inspiration taken from Outlast here, but don't discount this release as bargain bin trash just yet.
Despite the abundance of tried and true mechanics that are seemingly synonymous with survival horror these days, this title does have outstanding atmosphere. Though you'll be crouched, lurking in the shadows and avoiding snap-blade knife girl a lot, you'll be clenching your sphincter every second of the way as you pray that she doesn't notice you. There are many unavoidable scenarios that cause you to come face to face with her as well, leaving you only to hope that your feet don't betray you as you outrun her through mazes of rooms. Much of this tension comes from just not knowing when, or where, she will appear. The rest of it is born from the dreadfully silent, dimly lit, gore-laden environments. The ending is also very well done, and it sparks a whole new level of fear that the rest of the game didn't have; although this is one of those "To Be Continued" situations.
Though I generally try to stay away from these types of "me me me" segments in my reviews, this is something that needs to be put out there. I played Home Sweet Home at launch in 2017, and while I enjoyed it then, the game kept loading into VR (prior to the VR update, even) with no way to turn it off. I finally quit playing it because of horrible framerates that went as low as the 20's and stabilized in the 40's, and I decided to wait until technical patches came out. Now, nearly 2 years later, the game runs worse than before. I have an HTC Vive plugged in at all times, and my rig is an i7-6700k/GTX 1080/16GB DDR4 3000Hz RAM. It's pretty well a standard build that has had zero optimization issues in more graphically intense desktop and VR games. I could not, at all, get this game to run without crashing every 20 minutes; nor could I exceed 40 FPS after the first level. There doesn't seem to be anyone else having problems to this extent, so I am foregoing automatically not recommending this release because of these issues. Beware, however, that for some of us, these things are present, and I know my PC is a well oiled and fantastically maintained beast. Take it for what you will.
Due to the aforementioned, I am unfortunately unable to comment on the VR situation of Home Sweet Home. The gamma and brightness of the game have definitely been increased since its launch, so it should be easier to see in VR. However, with a framerate so unstable on the desktop version I would legitimately hate to try to experience this with a HMD on. Surprisingly, despite its copycat syndrome and technical shortcomings, Home Sweet Home manages to be one of the better modern horror experiences that you can have. It's dreadfully tense, it invokes many instances of adrenaline rushes, and seeing a game based around Thai lore is fascinating. It does start to get a little stale & tedious after a while, so its short 2-3 hour playtime is acceptable; anymore and the game would overstay its welcome by a landslide.
Rating: 4.0/5.0 - Excellent, highly worth playing.
👍 : 4 |
😃 : 1