Home had been a game I wanted to play for nearly 7 years. The idea of a 2D horror game that reads your actions as you play it in order to determine its ending was exciting to early-20s me. If the game had been released today, my reaction would be far more skeptical of what it means by "read my actions" for an ending. Not that games hadn't done it before, but more often than not the endings were determined by difficult to decipher criteria, such as in the Silent Hill games, and I had no reason to expect otherwise here. Multiple endings aren't something I find nearly as attractive nowadays as they aren't usually as interesting as an intentional story with an intended ending. Home, to modern me, sounds like a bad trick, the way a lot of randomly generated levels often feel now: toothless and without reason. And I'm not wrong, exactly, but I was being optimistic.
Home is a side scrolling horror game that is most simply described as "Silent Hill in 2D, but only the exploratory parts with no enemies", which is to say its primary gameplay loop has you checking every door in your vicinity, exploring each room, and looking for keys (sorry, no riddles here). The "horror" verbiage then comes from spooky sound effects and dead bodies, while you just walk knowing there isn't anything out there to get you. Or, at least, the game says they are dead bodies. The pixelated style doesn't do the horror aspect any favors, particularly. It's not that pixel art can't be used for horror, its that it doesn't particularly feel effective in how it's done here. Everything looks like a cartoon, and at worst like a pile of squares, as many of the "corpses" are. The way the game translates what is or is not a corpse is by narration. The narrator is you and, unfortunately, isn't giving you much autonomy. When something eerie is inspected, the narrator is quick to mention how scared he is, or how heavy X weapon feels in his hand when he finds it, because the game has no way of conveying this fear with its art style. As to why you have weapons in a game with no combat, well, they are murder weapons, you see. Turns out that a large number of people around town have been murdered, something you will discover on your long journey home in the dead of night. You start by waking up in an unknown house with no memory of how you got there, and a dead body in one of the rooms. Your goal is to make your way back home so you can get back to your wife, Rachel. As you explore, you are repeatedly given evidence that a serial killer is about, and it seems the killer has been killing often and recently. Not only this, but it seems that Rachel was one of his targets, and your journey home becomes desperate as you begin to wonder if you're too late to save her. At times it feels as though you may be hot on the heels of the killer, as you find abandoned weapons, notebooks of crossed out names, and dead bodies on your route home through the sewers, factory, abandoned train station, etc. Finding objects and clues along the way helps determine the ending you get, and, most notably, who the killer is.
And here is where the problem lies, largely. Spoilers ahead, but you should really be aware that in a game where the killer is determined at the end, any spoiler here is really rather moot. I'll avoid spoiling particular details of any ending, though, especially when interesting.
As surprisingly fun as exploring various 2D environments and locked doors is, the ending the game wants you to choose feels as though it is staring you in the face. Never mind the fact that quite a bit of time has apparently passed since these murders have happened, and never mind the fact that no one has discovered the bodies all around town, or the absolutely copious amount of evidence in literally every nook and cranny. (As a side annoyance: how did your laptop battery get to nearly dead since last you'd been home, but it had been long enough for your credit cards to be canceled from lack of payment?) The game reeks of half-baked. And to emphasize this, keen readers may have noticed a player verb I used earlier: you choose the ending you want. Granted, there are some caveats. For example, you would had to have found certain items, or inspected certain areas or bodies in order to have options for your ending, but it doesn't change the fact that instead of earning endings, you are implied to express yourself through which ending you choose. The problem with this is in how it contradicts the basic principles of storytelling. Laying out events in a sequence is meant to imply an ending. For an ending choice to matter, the events and plot elements leading up to this point should have some significant thematic interpretations so your ending feels like it is expressing your interpretation, but instead the game gives you boiler plate murder elements (often with contradictory evidence and an inconsistent sense of time) where all endings feel pretty valid. My interpretation feels vapid because the game remains as relatively vague as possible so as to be open to multiple endings. Everything in this game has already happened, which means I have no choice in how I affect the story. Instead, my "choices" that traditionally earn you endings are in how thorough I am at exploring. Given the entire gameplay loop is exploration, it's basically a test for how long I played the game. I get more endings the more I explored, and the more I explored the more vague the story feels because too many options start to open up in favor of more choices in endings. It feels loose, and subsequently devalues any interpretation I could have as to what transpired.
Which is a shame, because there is a kernel of an alright story here. The story points heavily at two characters, and depending on your interpretation, there is an interesting conflict between these two potential killers. Information is doled out at a good pace with drips here and there with a lot of thoughtful travel as you attempt to piece it all together. Likewise, atmosphere usually works even with the cartoonish art style. Exploration was something I resented in the opening moments while I was getting my bearings and wondering why I was supposed to care about all the spooky sounds randomly firing off around me, but it became something that almost saved it for me. I started to get rather excited as to how all of this was going to be interpreted at the end, and excited to see what was going to be in the next room or building, even as I sort of dreaded the multiple endings thing since all of my choices throughout were whether I was going to pick an item up (and why wouldn't I pick up everything since the game's endings are determined by how many you interact with). And there are interesting endings to this game, which is even more frustrating because if it had been given to me it would have been interesting. If the endings hadn't literally asked me which I wanted, this game would have had a slightly above mediocre rating for its brevity and basic level of fun. As is, there's not much to recommend here.
4.0
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