I couldn’t
let October pass without trying out at least one horror game and, since I’d
picked up Home Sweet Home on sale earlier in the year, it was the obvious
choice. How was it? Well, I don’t wanna go all middle school report card or
anything, but Home Sweet Home did NOT live up to its potential.
(Yikes.
Flashback. Lol.)
To be fair
to Home Sweet Home, I was actually pretty stoked about the game when I first
started playing it. The graphics are average (and better than I was expecting
for a game I paid less than a fiver for.) It’s dark without being too dark, which is a common problem with horror games (and, let’s be honest, horror
movies) these days. There are frequent changes in scenery as the story moves from one
chapter to the next, so you’re always on your toes, wondering what comes next.
At first, anyway –
but we’ll come back to that.
Home Sweet
Home really excels at creating tension, with subtle atmosphere and creeping
monsters that made me jump out of my skin on more than one occasion!
Creeping,
by the way, is the word of the game.
Be
prepared for stealth, stealth, and more stealth when you sit down to play Home
Sweet Home. I’m more of a charge-in-swinging kinda player so I really struggled
with that aspect of the game. It’s ALL creeping and hiding and waiting patiently
in lockers while a creepy ghost hovers outside, waiting for you to screw up.
Which you probably will. A lot. It’s a toughie.
Speaking
of creepy ghosts… the baddies are where Home Sweet Home starts to fall flat.
There are only three villains to face: the ghost of a female student with a boxcutter
(whose click-click-click will haunt my nightmares for weeks, I’m sure,) her
screeching minions, and a giant, one-eyed monster hanging around outside. At
first, the baddies are effective. Pretty darn terrifying, to be honest. But
when they’re the ONLY monsters you face, they lose their effectiveness very quickly.
Sadly,
that’s the best way to describe Home Sweet Home. It starts out freaking scary
as fuck but, when you find yourself repeating the same crap over and over and
over (and over because the save points are automatic and, if you get stabbed to
death – AGAIN – by Boxcutter Betty, you usually have to go back a fair way,) it
just becomes a chore.
I got so
bored with this one that about halfway through, I went online to see what other people were saying
about it. Plenty of rave reviews, which I get because it is scary (to
start,) with only the odd person like me saying that it was just dull. Worse than that, though, I
saw several people complaining that Home Sweet Home had a “To Be Continued”
ending, with the second part only available currently on Steam. That was when I
peaced out. It just isn’t worth the hassle of repetitive tasks to get
absolutely nowhere at the end.
Is Home
Sweet Home worth playing? Sure, it’s worth a look – if you can finish it in a
single playthrough. For me (maybe because I do NOT excel at stealth,) I had to
return to it too many times to replay the same sections so I got bored very
quickly. While I was intrigued by the Thai legends that inspired the game and
found it extremely jumpy when I first started playing it, by the time I washed
my hands of Home Sweet Home, I just found it frustrating and tedious.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ (3/5 stars)
