Home is an intensely unsatisfying experience, because at the end it feels like the developer didn't actually have any idea what the plot was about himself.

The gameplay mostly consists of walking around and finding vague, uninteresting clues to hint towards what's actually going on, as well as some very simple, very easily solvable puzzles. The focal point of the game comes at the end, wherein you're brought to a place where the clues of the game start adding up, forming the hints that start showing the big picture of what has happened.

The problem with this is that the game's ending clues are determined by your seemingly arbitrary actions and choices. Even worse, the changes that are possible barely even change what the game's purported ending is supposed to be. To top it off, at the end, you're actually directed to an online forum where you're encouraged to share your ending and what you think it meant.

This makes it feel like the game doesn't actually have any story at all. Nothing is resolved, nothing is explained, the game literally just gives you a few hints and goes "hey you figure out the plot, because I sure as hell am not." It doesn't feel smart or creative at all, it just feels lazy, like the dev wanted to make a game that has lots of interesting symbolism but isn't nearly creative enough to write anything interesting. If I'm just supposed to use my head and think up something myself, I see no reason to pay some pretentious dev money to do so.

Starts out promising and goes downhill rather fast. Also there's no saving so you got to complete it in one sitting or you got to restart from the start and that gets tedious from the get go (game is about an hour to an hour and a half long). You basically get at the end of the game and decide what you want to believe happened which is just BS and leaves you feeling like its all a waste of time.

Check it out if you already own it but with far better adventure games with an actual coherent plot on steam, don't bother picking this one up.

Nice horror game.

You play as some guy waking up in a place he doesn't know and tries to understand what happened in the past few hours.

The pixalised graphics are ok, but would probably look better if the game wasn't totaly fullscreen.

The best thing about this game is the way the story is narated by the character you control, and that what you do / choose can modify your character's thoughts and naration.
Some moments are a bit annoying at first, since you want to explore everything and wonder what you missed, sometimes there's different paths and as soon as you choose one you're stuck in that direction.
But in the end that's how you end up with your own version of the story, and own opinion about what happened.
At the end, the game even lets you share how you interprete the story online, and can compare to what others have thought.

Not really a scrary game, but an original experience for sure.

Shortly after playing a wonderful little title called Lone Survivor, I stumbled upon Home. It looked similarly charming, and both games obviously draw inspiration from Silent Hill 2.

So, why is it that Lone Survivor plays out like a haunting love letter to Silent Hill while Home feels uninspired? I think it is greatly because Lone Survivor smartly crafted its own story while taking on the mechanics and atmosphere of Silent Hill. Home, on the other hand, shoplifts nearly all of its parts from elsewhere but tweaks nothing in any interesting ways.

In short, Home sets itself up for failure due to a seeming lack of confidence in its own story. What starts out intriguing, then swiftly becomes derivative and predictable.

SPOILER ALERT

Here is how I would best describe this game:

You wander around a (mostly) abondoned landscape. The audio and visuals are both very compelling in the 8-bit realm that this game occupies. Your character doesn't remember what has happened, only that everyone is dead, and his leg hurts. You are searching for your wife, and immediately, you are led to believe that the character you control killed her in a drunken stupor. [I am very engaged]

You arive at your house having been led to believe that your digital wife cheated on you, and you killed her for it. You are then asked to descibe what happened, based on what you have seen in the game. It concludes with a story of what "must have happened" based on your previous responses and actions.... except that the resulting storyline is contradictory and rediculous. Did you find your wifes body? No? Oh, well then she was just a figure of your imagination. Did a former coworker return to town for something? Yes? Well then clearly he was the one sleeping with your wife.

Wait... was she made up, or was she real and triffling? Ugh.

Best part of this game is it takes about 70 minutes start to finish and cost me $3. Save yourself the time and money.

Disappointing.

I played Home last year and found it to be subtly creepy and maintain an intriguing story. I've replayed it and it still holds that spooky atmosphere and can see myself, coming back to it when I want a quick spooky game, in another years time.

For something that is basic in the graphical department, it nevertheless is splattered with details you notice, like a creepy pair of eyes staring at you in the woods. The sound is very well done, especially that added little "leg limping" bit. It's easy to continue playing until you reach the ending, which can take just 1hr in a sitting.

Home is a 2D side scrolling mystery story based game. You'll walk left and right, open doors and find clues. The clues help you find out why you woke up in someone else's house and what has happened to your wife Rachel. Objects you can interact with will have an outline when you walk next to them. You will collect items, but have no inventory. The game spans a few locations and each location has several different rooms. Two houses, woods, a sewer system and a factory. There are locked doors and you'll need to find keys, hairpins and other ways to open them. After each location, the character will reference objects that you found and ponder what they could mean.

The art style is very pixelated for better or worse. It doesn't feel too detailed. The only animation is the character's walk animation. Everything else is a static object. The game is very story based and you will be reading a lot. My only problem with the dialog is that it has its own screen. It takes me out of the game when it has its own screen. As game calling itself horror, it is all at night and your character is carrying a lantern. While you come across pixelated horror such as dead night watchmen and read about it, there is no threat. So its not scary. Nothing is out to get you. There is no pressure.

As you search through the locations you'll tackle a few light puzzles to progress forward. You'll find dead bodies and read through text about how rancid trash is and some back story about your character. Even with no map, I don't feel like I ever got lost. Most things you find, you get a choice to take it or not. Find a bloody knife, do you take it or leave it? Normally the choice would be laughable. Of course people want to take it. Well everything you take leads up to something and what you take and the story molds itself nicely to what you have and don't have.

That's really what this game excels at, an interactive story that molds itself to your choices. Do you uncover a pair of bodies? Do you take a video tape that is potential evidence? Do you read a letter that you find hanging out of a mailbox? Did you find a list of names or not?

Home can be played in an hour or so. My second time through I speed ran it in about 20 minutes. There are many different endings depending on the choices you made. Even with different endings, I don't feel like the game is worth replaying. Its over too quick to give impact to any ending. The game feels like there wasn't much effort put in. Everything is text, no real animation. I'm reading emotions rather than seeing the graphics convey the emotions. Television and video games are visual mediums. I should be seeing things, not reading them. I wouldn't be so harsh on the text if it didn't have its own dedicated screen to take me out of the game.

Very strange experience, worth to be played if you have about 1 hour to kill :)

Now this is a fairly simple point & click story-based game. It's said to be a horror game, but steers more towards mystery. What bothered me the most was the lack of a cohesive ending to the story, it was left without a closure. But then again, reading other people's speculations and figuring out your own left the game in the back of your mind for some time.
I can think of better and worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

Horror is an interesting genre, both in the myriad of different ways it can be presented, and the inherent bizarre nature of existing to voluntarily scare us. But like any established genre, there are certain tropes and cliches that, while not necessarily problematic by nature have a tendency to stand out as lazy, boring substitutes for more creative writing like someone grabbing various pieces of other works to form their own blob of uninspired concoction.

The reason this is at all relevant is for the fact Home, something of a horror/choose-your-own-adventure mashup, seems to exist almost as an example of how an over reliance on tired tropes can create something that's both immensely dull and almost laughable. With every line of dialogue it cements itself within an impenetrable block of ambiguous, derivative nonsense, substituting in player choice for a lack of any definitive answers and in the process creating an abundance of narrative dissonance.

It's entirely possible I chose the "wrong" path, made inaccurate assumptions about what may or may not have happened by which to base my outcome on, but if so that doesn't dispel the issue of how easily it is to make said mistakes and thus wind up with a story that's so convoluted and full of holes that any answers you may be hopping to obtain might legitimately not exist. Perhaps it's a bit telling that the most interesting element of Home are the stories and explanations people have come up with to try and make sense out of the experience, though as far as I've read never quite being able to explain away all the gaps in a way that is at all believable.

As far as I can tell those answers are by design nowhere to be found. Whether this is the result of over ambitious, disorganized, or just lazy writing (or some combination there of) I couldn't say, but the end result is little more than a mess that I'd be happy to never have to wade through again.

Do Not Use A Controller! You are forced to use the analog stick which doesn't work properly and you unknowingly skip essenential dialogue. I didn't realize this was happening until late in the game (I missed nearly all of the most plot-essential document in the ending).

It's an interesting idea with some potential, but then you reach the ending where you basically just choose what happens nullifying your exploration earlier in the game. Imagine if LOTR ends just as Frodo approaches Mount Doom and then simply asks you what you want to happen. Disappointing.

I liked this game. I thought it was well done for a pixelated adventure. It was dark and spooky, the sound was great. I like the open interpretation. It's very detailed. Anyone who gives this a bad review obviously didn't understand what they were buying. I give this game a thumbs up.

The game asked me whether I should take [item_name] or not.
I didn't take it.
And nothing happened.
But I made my pointless (in terms of this game's logic) choice. I'm proud of my decision and my confidence, I didn't complete the game because of that though.

I bought Home at the same time I bought Lone Survivor when they were both on sale. Lone Survivor was good, Home not so much. Once you start Home, the game informs you that it is best played in a dark room while wearing headphones and that it should only take an hour or so to beat. Suitably prepared for jump scares after the recomendation to use headphones, I dawned them and turned off the lights.

You begin by waking up in a strage house with no memory of the events prior to falling asleep, so far so standard. After stumbling around the house looking at things, the game's first piece of horror comes in the form of a door slamming somewhere in the house. This did startle me and now made me feel unsafe in what I had hought was an empty house. For about the next twenty minutes the game makes me feel tense. The sudden noises and clostrophobic amount of light you have to see by do well to create a sense of atmosphere and tension.

However, this didn't last. Around the thrid time hearing a noise I was on the edge of my seat; expecting something to leap out and tear my face off any second. By the eigth time I heard a noise, I realized 'any second' wasn't ever going to come. All too soon I realized that all the game had up its sleeve were noises, creating the illusion of being stalked by something that never shows up. Indeed nothing much happens at all in this game.

Starting from the most generic opening, the game never solidifies. You are searching for a way out of you initial location and get home to your wife, stumbling through the wake of some monster or killer that is presumably present. Along the way you come across a bunch of seemingly unconnected murder victims and personal effects of your wife, all of it remaining a huge mystery up until the end. But instead of there actually being any form of resolution the game down right expects you to choose your twist ending; blatantly asking you which twist is the one that happens. Then you must choose how you rationalize the events with the ending you chose. This ends up creating a jumbled mess of meaningless atempts at symbolism and rendering pointless any build-up you might have felt as you are forced to choose the meaning behind every mystery in the game.

Admittedly I missed one or two things. I never found out what was on the tape and I missed one or two rooms in the factory because I didn't realize the door that required a key card would lock behind me and force me to exit the level. But I don't feel like any of that would have helped. Even if the game weren't a pile of random environments and situations that might be considered spooky, anything they might have lended to the plot would all be rendered meaningless by choosing your ending anyway. All in all, both the horror and the story held no weight and left me feeling let down.

BUY IT!

I just finished! The game is wonderful, very in-depth and interesting. When you play, paying attention is a must, the story is well detailed and thought out.

Graphics-10. With the shading, color coordination, and item details, the game's graphics are great. I will admidt, Home probably wouldn't be so interesting if it were anything else other than a pixelated platformer.

Story-10. It's not worth playing if you don't do it in one playthrough. Some parts of the story are a bit confusing, but harder to understand when there are interruptions.

Even though the game is quite short and simple it is well surpassing it's retail price of $2.99.

One great thing about the game is that, at some points in the story (depending on some of your own choices) the evironment will change a bit as you progress, and the main character will begin to see things differently from a mental view as you learn more and make decisions.

To make this short:

Save your pocket change and go buy a bag of chips or something. A bag of lays perferably. It will be equally as dissapointing.

To make this long:

*Spoilers

The beginning of this game was great, story line was awesome. You're left confused on if you commited a murder or are you really innocent; did someone commit the murder? Did someone kill your wife or did she just leave you?

Well, you decide.

Literally.

No matter the story line, the task of making sure you find every little clue to help solve this mystery, you're left empty handed at the end of the game because you get to decide what happens. You can drop everything you've discovered and kill yourself or verify it all and, well, still kill yourself.

I liked this game a lot when I started playing. I thought it was going to be a deep murder mystery that you may or may not have done. But, you did, and you're in denial. Even if you choose either option you're still left with a cliff hanger.

How did this happen? Why did this happen? What drove you to do this? Why was your wife cheating?

Who knows. The developer probably doesn't even know.

A decent short game with an interesting plot that propels you into searching for clues as to how you wound up where you did and why.

This being advertised as a horror game is somewhat misleading... depending on how you define such a game. I was expecting to be afraid, or at the very least to feel on edge. Being the scardey cat that I am, I surprisingly never felt uncomfortable. It was somewhat of a letdown in that respect.

What I did like about the game is that while finding clues, your character will sometimes propose questions that basically ask you how he should interpret them. You can make him start to feel guilty, as if he's done something wrong, or you can project that onto other characters. This seemed to play a big role in how your character inevitably decides how to handle what he's discovered, and inevitably deciding how the story will end.

Like for many other reviewers, that still didn't feel like enough. You never find out the truth of what happened, only your interpretation based on what you observed. I admit, in retrospect it's clever and almost enough. But I wanted to KNOW what happened; so I was left feeling unsatisfied.

I wish I didn't have to give a yes or no recommendation as I could see how some people would enjoy it for the very reasons others don't—and vise versa. I give it an apathetic 'eh'.

Could have been better tbh when playing it, it allways felt for a horror game it was missing a scary element or even a creepy feel to it on the up side love the graphics but the story could have been better :/.

I really liked the concept of this game. No jump scares, but there's a creepiness to it that made it enjoyable, and I like being creeped out more than startled. My only problem with it was that - 100% honest - despite the creepiness I got kinda bored and fell asleep while I was playing it. Though I did wake up a few minutes later and I finished it, so that counts for something, right?

sooo, just finished the game, which has an pretty much open ending, what some people might appreciate and many will find rather unsatisfying.
Dont expect a horrifying atmosphere alá Amnesia or shockmoments in yo face alá Resident Evil. Its more like in Memento, u find yourself in a situation and try to figure out what happened, based on the clues you find. There are no other characters to interact with. Gameplay contents of walking around, looking at things and trying to solve the puzzle. Some parts of the (possible) story are contradictory to others, so you cannot find out what happened consequentially, so you have to prefer your imagination.
I found it realy interresting to read what other players thought what happened and compare it to my version.
Overall its a innovativ but short little game-novel.
Recommend to people who like books without pictures in it.