Home is a unique horror game adventure set in a beautifully realized pixel world. It’s a murder mystery with a twist, because you decide what ultimately happens. Awakened by an oncoming storm, you open your eyes to discover yourself in a strange, dark room. Tucked away in a house that’s not yours.
You can’t remember anything that happened, or how you got here. Trying to get some bearings on your situation, you walk around the unknown house a bit. It doesn’t take long before you stumble across something horrible, there’s a body here. This just raises more questions. You have to leave the house and find out what happened here.
There’s many different places you explore, and you’ll find there’s death everywhere. You make your way through many familiar places. The factory where you worked, your friends store, and even the forest where you vaguely remember walking through before. There’s many prompts where you can decide yes/no about whether to do something or take an item. These will make a big difference about what happens in the story, and sometimes the end.
While trying to find your way back to your house, you’ll find a lot of your missing possessions. What’s especially odd is that you find them around a lot of dead people. All of which look like they’re murder victims. The entire contents of your wallet has been scattered around the world, and your watch was also buried out there too. If you find them all, you’ll unlock a special achievement.
Home Explained
Once you find your way to your house, you discover the final victim. The worst has happened, and your wife has been murdered. It’s now time to piece together everything you’ve seen and decide what actually happened. Going through the house, we look over the items we’ve come across during the adventure to create a summary of events.
My decision was that our main character is the one who is responsible. If you logically decide what happened during the events at the end, I think the best explanation is that we’re the one that murdered everyone. That’s if you’ve explored enough and found all of your items of course. If you didn’t find them, you can stay ignorant to many facts of the game and act like a lot of stuff never happened.
Our watch, and the many items of our wallet were scattered everywhere. They were found in the same places that the murder victims were found. Sometimes even right next to them. The man tells himself, “I don’t see how it could have happened any other way.”
All Endings and Your Choices
There’s three different endings you can choose at the end. You can end it in the kitchen, the bathroom, or you can just leave. After each ending, the story will be told depending on how much you did and what you found.
In order to get the ending in the kitchen, you must keep the gun the entire way. You’ll be prompted to leave it at Norman’s house, so make sure you choose not to. With the gun in hand, you can walk into the kitchen and start the first ending.
To get “A Warm Place”, you just need to take the knife in the basement and walk up to the bathroom on the 3rd floor. This time you can end it in the bathtub. Both of the first two are pretty grim, but the man had accepted his fate. He either decided he was responsible and deserved it, or he had nothing left to live for since everyone he knows is dead.
The final and probably most positive choice is to leave through the front door. Ultimately, it was best to keep moving on. No matter if you found yourself guilty, or decided you had to continue on discovering the truth. If you interacted with very little prompts and didn’t pick up anything unnecessary, you can also pretend like nothing happened.
What Happened? You Decide
Home is a unique and immersive horror game with a thought provoking story. I found it very comfortable to play, and I liked the amount of possibilities the game has depending on your choices. Even something as small as finding an extra item while investigated can cause small dialogue difference. Sometimes a small choice can effect the entire game.
It’s not really that scary though, it’s more about the mystery of everything that happened. There’s no jump scares, and nothing to lose besides missing some parts of the story.
It takes a little over an hour to complete if you investigate the extra places. You should play through multiple times to find things you missed before, and to see the other endings. Developed by Benjamin Rivers, and available on Windows, Mac, and consoles.
