Update One Hundred and Forty-Four: 21 March 2018
Home is Where One Starts...
0.9 hours, 8 of 8 achievements
4/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
I feel like this is a new record. Not only have I posted three times today, I’ve got a post up three times in a row. I like to think it’s to make up for my lack of dedicated time to play video games coming up.
So. Home is Where One Starts… is a micro micro walking simulator. It’s about twenty minutes long and it costs three whole US American dollars… and it is not worth that price. Dr. Langeskov was free, and had far more intelligent design and interesting ideas behind it - this falls far, FAR short of that.
I wanted to like it, but there just… isn’t anything here. There’s about ten voice over spots in the game, and while they’re very well acted… they’re all incredibly generic, and build a pretty predictable narrative in blocky, unspecific strokes. The level design is nonexistent and unintuitive - it was like taking a walk around a random part of the woods near my own home, and I could have just done that and reminesced on my shitty childhood and saved the 3 US American. There is very little art or design in this, and that’s a shame.
It’s a shame because I know exactly what emotion this game was trying to portray, but it was not executed well enough to capture it. The strange feeling of being a child, and thinking outside of the moment, of staring quietly into nature in the morning and being smaller and bigger than your body, knowing there’s so much world out there beyond these invisible walls. That’s amazing and enrapturing… but beyond this game’s grasp.
Unfortunate.
Next up: Anyways, let’s Haruki Murakami it up!
See you soon!
Hmm…now I’m kinda tempted to play Home is Where One Starts to see if I get the same impression.
I’ll be curious what you think about Memoranda. It kinda seemed interesting (indie point-and-click if nothing else), but I didn’t love the artstyle and some reviews scared me away. We’ll see. And I don’t know who Haruki Murakami is.
:-( And I’m sorry you had a shitty childhood. <3
Give it a shot, esp. if you have it already. It just unfortunately didn’t work for me - I think it was the lack of design and the so-so writing which made me not like it. Playing it so soon after Dr. Langeskov didn’t help either - the caliber of games is just too wildly different between them.
I think Memoranda’s art style is gorgeous - the set design, anyway, I have to get closer and look at the people. I’ll report back soon for ya.
Haruki Murakami is a prolific Japanese novelist who is known for twining his novels with magical realism, which, when done right, is one of my favorite things ever. (The best example? the novel the Shadow of the Wind.) Murakami is one weird-ass motherfucker, and while sometimes how he handles his female characters makes me squint, there’s a magnetic way he writes that really isn’t like anybody else. He’s best known for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and the huge doorstop IQ84. I have a soft spot for him because he loves jazz, and the influence of the music shows up in his work - ‘Paper Moon’ is a big motif in IQ84, for example.
and aww, it wasn’t TOO bad. Just dad problems, like at least 70% of the people I know. I appreciate your well-wishes though c: