Home

By all appearances, Home is like an old choose-your-own-adventure book -- an open-ended story filled with suspense and mystery, where your choices subtly, and not-so-subtly, change what you discover and what your interpretation might be. This structure encourages multiple playthroughs, so you can gradually piece together the whole puzzle. But this isn't exactly what Home is, after all. Home is a little more like an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It's a shame, because for the majority of the game, Home really pulls off an air of mystery. It thrives on an excellent atmospheric presentation, with enough ambient sounds and visual effects to keep you wondering when something will jump out at you. There are early signs of betraying narrative realism for the sake of game-ification - hidden switches and simple puzzles - but these are fairly uncommon. Every inspectable object, every item you can choose to pick up or leave alone, every door you can enter or pass by, feels like a meaningful choice whether to investigate or to press on toward your titular home. You have plenty of opportunities to choose between going on with your current knowledge and assumption of the story, or taking pause to uncover more information.

But as Home nears its conclusion, this mystery doesn't come together at all. Instead, the game asks you directly what you think is happening, and then that becomes what happened. The real questions of the game's story are replaced with abstract twists, and any potential resolution is wiped out by total ambiguity. This doesn't seem to be an accident, according to the game's creator.

By all appearances - further supported by the game's closing screen, which points you to a story-sharing page on its website - the real "purpose" of Home is to forge your own unique story and share it with others. But what's the point of this when the unique aspects of your story are so arbitrary, and also so brief when compared to the rich mystery backdrop? To write all the components of a compelling plot, and muddle it with what just feels like a last-minute gimmicky twist, seems so wasteful.

To me, what's most disappointing about the open story is the parts that aren't open. The game's clearly-delineated levels are all one-way trips, even when the exit from one to the next isn't obvious, and so it's easy to permanently miss a clue by accidentally moving on to the next area. Why? Because the player character doesn't want to go back. In a game built around choices and interpretation, this limitation is a clear mistake.

Home is an interesting experiment in interactive storytelling, but I wouldn't call it a successful one. Calling it a total failure isn't fair, because it does build a great atmosphere and make fair progress toward a compelling mystery. But its missteps - which seem to be intentional, by design - make it impossible to take Home as seriously as it wants to be taken.

Better than: Shadow of Destiny
Not as good as: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Would have liked it a lot better: if there was a clear ending, or if I could backtrack and fill in the rest of my own story. Either!

Progress: Finished one play-through, read about others