The Haunted Hoard: Home (PC)

What makes a video game a horror game can be hard to classify, and Home feels like an excellent example of that issue. From what Home puts forward, I’d probably classify it as more of a moody mystery game, although since mystery isn’t a title often used as a video game genre, perhaps a narrative adventure game would be a better classification, a point and click adventure without the pointing. However, Home at least thinks its a horror game if its official website homehorror.com is anything to go by. Besides its dark atmosphere and some bloody bodies too pixelated to be grotesque though, Home doesn’t really try to terrify the player, telling a grounded story free of the supernatural and instead putting its focus on constructing a story in an unusual manner.

Home begins with the player’s character waking up in an unfamiliar house at night and finding the body of a dead man with no clue who it is or how he was killed. With nothing but a flashlight, our protagonist immediately sets off to find his way home and make sure his wife Rachel is safe. Along the way, the strange town is revealed to have much more than just a single death lurking under its surface, the game placing objects along the path homeward to get you thinking about what might be taking place. Your actions in Home are all activated by clicking on a highlighted object in the background, the player walking around finding information on the situation, solving small puzzles to open the way forward, and picking up little items that may prove to be useful later. The puzzles exist more as ways to make you move about an area a bit before letting you move, trying to get the player to engage with more of the dark town to begin getting them to ponder the mystery around the entire situation. Along the way, certain objects or situations will call for the player to answer a yes or no question. Some are as simple as whether or not to pick up an item, an action that can actually have some consequences, as many decisions are based around Home’s strange way of telling a story.

 

In Home, there is no guaranteed conclusion. There is no set ending, and the player is actually called upon to decide if a big reveal occurs with those yes or no questions. Because of this, Home does not have any definitive answer to some of the questions it raises, although the different endings do offer alternatives for the player to pursue and see if they find that the more satisfying conclusion. Ultimately though, no matter what route you choose with this story you somewhat construct yourself, you hit a bit of a snag when it comes to the set-up to get there. Home points in a lot of vague directions with the clues it lays around for you to consider, but when it comes time to wrap things up, no ending can truly encapsulate all the stuff you might have found. By choosing a certain ending, you must ignore what should have been important information, and seemingly important details like full on dead people might just be inexplicable red herrings. Home definitely wants the player to not think too much about what’s left behind and focus on the things that do work for the chosen path, but even then it never really gives you any confirmation for whatever theory you settle on. There are routes more solid and supported than the others, but Home is specifically designed with the goal of getting people discussing its deliberate lack of clear answers.

If you as the player wish to play somewhat into the horror angle, the usual cop-out of insanity producing meaningless details on the path home is technically an option, but it also invalidates pretty much everything else the game puts out for you to consider by making everything technically unreliable. Of course, this spins you out of the parameters of the game world, where the game does have a few paths guided by what you did or did not find on your journey. It doesn’t take the time to sort out the evidence, although you can reconsider its meaning near the end of the game as the yes or no questions begin to appear to start guiding the finale. The build up to get there is at least done well enough that had Home ended with a definitive answer or even multiple endings that accommodated everything properly, it might not feel so hollow. The first run through and I thought I had a good idea of what might have happened, answered the end questions to make it line up with that, and it still ended with ambiguity surrounding most of the affair. In some ways it might match the reality of a mystery, in that you have to go on what you think rather than something you can know for certain.

 

Trying to connect the dots to make a personal narrative for the story is exactly what Home is trying to get the player to do, but the situation feels like it will always have loose ends and variables unaccounted for. It is a game up for interpretation by design, but it feels like having a satisfying stance on the affair leaves you standing on shaky ground. Since it chose to root itself in a realistic world despite its pixel art style, it can’t even be written off as an unreliable mindscape or some intentionally deceptive narrator. The game does have many moments of the main character relating events as if in the past tense, but he’s not a narrator entirely in control of the situation due to your incursion on affairs by answering his yes or no choices. Despite being a game that changes based on your answers, it seems to have very few solid answers to give you itself.

THE VERDICT: Home may call itself horror, but it feels like the 2D equivalent of a narrative exploration game. In those games, you go about and look at things to unravel a story, sometimes left without a full explanation of the plot by the end of it. This means that Home has to rely on its narrative almost exclusively, and while it’s got a nice gloomy atmosphere, it spills out too many details for any narrative to latch onto, ending up a mishmash that can’t truly be solidly interpreted. Your opinion may vary on whether this narrative experiment in letting the player decide the in-game conclusions is interesting, but it doesn’t quite execute it properly. Home is the video game version of a poem, laying out much for the player to consider without stating it directly, but Home just doesn’t have the solid structure it needs to properly guide the mind towards conclusions that conclusively satisfy the questions it sets up.

 

And so, I give Home for the PC…

A BAD rating. Unsurprisingly, a game decided deliberately to lead to discussion about its oddball approach to plot structuring invites most of the review being about that element, but even with the issues it has, thinking about it isn’t a completely awful experience. No conclusion you draw from the path you follow through the game is perfect, but you can settle on something that could be close to the truth rather than being completely lost with no answers by the end of it. It still leaves far too much up in the air regardless of what narrative is attached to it, and that sometimes contradictory nature is what makes Home less than a fun test of how you can involve the player in the game’s plot. Choose Your Own Adventure books already exist and manage to better keep their branching narratives connected while also finding ways to wrap themselves up more clearly. At least the tone of the game is consistent and strong, with a sense of unease as you explore the area between the starting house and your home, but when you bet on the plot carrying the experience, it can’t just cop out with a multiple choice finale that won’t work fully no matter what way you pick.

 

There are certainly many explanations for what the events of Home really mean, the website for the game even containing a page with some theories from fans about it. None seem to account for everything save the cheapest go-tos for the unexplainable like coincidence and insanity, but Home could have almost been something decent and worthy of deeper discussion if it remembered everything it had set up. While I’d love to see an interpretation that jumps through all the hoops necessary to tie it together meaningfully, Home itself is designed not to have such an ending, meaning it will always feel a little bit hollow unless you can truly buy into its idea that the narrative you decide on, even though it is by its nature flawed, is true so long as you wish it to be.