There are plenty of horror games out there. From Resident Evil to Alone in the Dark to Dead Rising, they all have one thing in common. They all attempt to scare us and entertain us at the same time. Some of them manage to pull it off, like the glorious horror smorgasbord that is Resident Evil 4 (Leon…so dreamy). Some of them are much slower-paced affairs however, eking out the occasional scare and slowly ratcheting up the tension. Home Sweet Home falls somewhere in the middle, often but not always succeeding and generally managing to be fairly creepy across the board.
Home Sweet Home is the brainchild of Yggdrazil Group, a Thai development studio. They don’t only make games however. They do advertising, graphics editing, TV effects, and a plethora of other work. As such, I suspect Home Sweet Home is a labor of love for them, since as far as I can tell, it’s their first game. It’s steeped heavily in Thai folklore and mythology but still comes off as approachable. Much of the folklore from Southeast Asia tends not to make it to the West, so it’s always interesting when something like this pops up and has all new concepts and monsters for us to explore.
Generally, first person horror is hit or miss. Either the game is painfully slow, brutally cheap (in terms of gameplay, not cost), or it flows fast and furious. Home Sweet Home is instead a slow burn. It starts out abruptly with virtually no storyline and you simply die. Some sort of ghost girl slaughtered me within minutes of beginning the game, and she did it repeatedly. The death scenes are not really shown; things just go red and you get to continue, but it’s still jarring to have a bloody ghost attack you with a butcher knife on a 55” screen in HD. She’s fast too. But after a bit, Home Sweet Home really manages to open up and come into it’s own. It doesn’t take long, but it definitely could have used a bit more introduction.
At first I thought Home Sweet Home would end up like Clock Tower 3, as the first set of sequences has you running and hiding, waiting for an opportunity to sneak by carefully so you don’t get, well, skewered. Gameplay also incorporates many of the better elements of other horror titles however, such as locating items and minimalistic puzzle solving a la Resident Evil, and some interesting parallels to Silent Hill. Initially, I’d worried there might not be much of a plot, but as the game continues, the items and story fragments you find weave a tapestry that tells you what’s happening, if not exactly why it might be. By the end of the first section of the game I was interested. By the middle of the second I was hooked, but the plot definitely takes some patience, as well as a back seat to the suspense and jump scares.
Some of the subtlety involved in Home Sweet Home is interesting too. Pictures that fall down every time you leave the room, doors and walls that appear and disappear when you turn around, and shadows that follow you around all plague you at every turn. It all creates an ambient tension that works fairly well. Unfortunately, the suspense is mitigated somewhat by issues like poor level design, the occasional sound dropout, and subtitles that show partly offscreen. Home Sweet Home is plagued by minor technical issues that tend to detract from what is otherwise a lovely and intensely disturbing horror title.
I also was mildly irritated with the lack of translation in the game. A fair amount of written text is in untranslated Thai (aka Central Thai or Siamese). Being unable to read some of the creepy warnings painted in blood was a bit of a disappointment, and the same goes for the Thai text in other parts of the game. Key items are translated, but not everything. I love seeing the original script, as it’s a beautiful language, but it would definitely be more immersive to be able to read it too.
The music and audio in Home Sweet Home is top notch however. Sound cues vanish into the distance and return full force, accompanied by musical cues that ratchet up the tension fast. Music fades into the background, but always manages to be on point and focus your attention. Again much akin to Silent Hill, sound plays an important role in Home Sweet Home. The level of detail in terms of sound more than makes up for some of the other aspects of the game, such as level design.
Level design is easily one of the weakest parts of Home Sweet Home. Levels are quite linear, with only one or two short branching paths which always lead to dead ends. There aren’t any traps, most unused doors don’t have the option to be opened, and you begin to feel like you’re being handheld through a level rather than actually exploring it. I found that this sensation got worse as I played through the game. Even pathways that could easily have been less predictable manage to suffer under this minimalistic level design. In addition, objects that need to be grabbed and/or utilized are often hard to make the game register, as you have to focus on them without a crosshair and wait for your icon to shift before interaction. Several times, this ended up turning into a quick death for me. Other times, it simply meant that I didn’t even have to try a second route, thereby lowering the tension level by raising my expectations of an impending encounter or attack.
Home Sweet Home was originally designed for the PC but the Xbox port manages to control quite well and overall holds up during gameplay. The camera moves a little fast, the game responds a little slow, but there’s no direct combat, so that really shouldn’t matter. It would be swell to have some mapping functions and other options to control, but alas, that wasn’t something that Yggdrazil bothered with. Something to, say, adjust the subtitles up to visible height would be nice for example (hint, hint). And if you hadn’t guessed yet, there are no weapons either. You pretty much have to survive on your wits and whatever you can find to assist you in the environment. Generally that isn’t much either, so be aware of your surroundings! In case you’re wondering, on the PC, Home Sweet Home is also available in VR on Steam, which I suspect would be particularly terrifying!
Ultimately if you like horror, want to be scared, and are willing to overlook a couple of minor faults, Home Sweet Home is definitely worth picking up. At $17.99, it’s not overpriced, and it certainly manages to both immerse you in Thai lore and occasionally scare the pants off you. There’s also a giant demon wang waggling by in one scene that absolutely left me goggling, partly due to shock, and partly because someone had to digitally paint and texture it in HD. I loved the story once it got going, and I’ve rarely seen a game shift so seamlessly between gameplay styles and design concepts. All in all, excellent work from the devs over at Yggdrazil Group and a game it’s hard not to recommend, especially on a dark and rainy fall evening!
This review was written based on a retail digital copy of Home Sweet Home for the Xbox One which was provided by the developer. The game was played on an XBox One X in 1080p on a 55″ Sony LED TV in complete darkness, alone in a basement late at night after a couple of excellent drinks.